Bitcoin Difficulty Records the First Positive Adjustment in 2 Months as Miners Come Online

Finally, after four consecutive downward adjustments, Bitcoin mining difficulty made a positive adjustment to the upside this weekend. With an increase of 6% on Saturday, the mining difficulty has broken its second-biggest running streak. At 14.496 trillion, we are currently down 42% from the late May all-time high of 25.04 trillion. The difficulty first started dropping in May after the exodus of Chinese miners from the country after regulators cracked down hard on trading and mining cryptocurrency. As we reported last week, the People’s Bank of China held a meeting in which it decided to maintain the high regulatory pressure on illegal virtual currency trading in the second half of the year as well. Chinese miners were forced to shut their operations and move out, who since have been looking at Kazakhstan, Canada, and the US as potential replacements. As miners are coming online, the hash rate is recovering and back above 100/Th/s from 68 Th/s in late June, the difficulty to mine Bitcoin also increased as more and more miners are now competing to earn BTC currently trading under $40k. Publicly listed Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings actually announced on Monday that it has entered into a contract with Bitmain to purchase an additional 30,000 Antminer S19j Pro (100 TH/s) miners for $120.7 million. The delivery of these newly purchased miners is expected to be between January 2022 and June 2022. Once all miners are fully deployed and operational, Marathon will produce approximately 13.3 EH/s hashing power. This order will help the company grow its operations by 30% to produce 13.3 EH/s. “Increasing our percentage of the total network’s hash rate increases our probability of earning bitcoin, and given the uniquely favorable conditions in the current mining environment, we believe it is an opportune time to add new miners to our operations,” said Fred Thiel, Marathon’s CEO. [deco-beg-single-coin-widget coin="BTC"]