Bitcoin’s Computing Power Sets New Record as Over 100K Miners Go Online
The total computing power now dedicated to securing the bitcoin blockchain has set yet another record.
According to data from mining services operator BTC.com, the average bitcoin mining hash rate over the last two weeks has reached71.43 quintillion hashes per second (EH/s), up from 64.49EH/s on July 23. The threshold was breached as bitcoin adjusted its mining difficultyat block height 586,672 on Monday 2:52 UTC – that is a 6.94EH/s, or10.78 percent jump since mid July.
Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards on bitcoin. Just how difficult the bitcoin software makes it to generate new blocks adjusts every 2,016 blocks – approximately every 14 days – to ensure the block production time remains about 10 minutes at the next cycle.
Assume this additional 6.9EH/s (or 6.9 million tera hashes per second, TH/s) computing power has all come from powerful ASIC miners, such as Bitmain’s AntMiner S17 or MicroBT’s WhatsMiner M20S, both of which boast a mining rate of around 55TH/s and recently hit the market.
That means more than 100,000 top-of-line ASIC miners could have been switched on within the past two weeks. Further, given these products have been sold for at least $2,000 each, this equates to some $200 million in revenue pocketed for major miner makers.
The continued interest in bitcoin mining comes at a time when the cryptocurrency’s price appears to be en route to challenging all-time highs, however distantly, and amid the arrival of the rainy season in China, which leads to cheaper hydropower electricity costs in the country’s southwest provinces – a region that isreportedto account for 50 percent of the global mining activity,
Miners in Chinaestimatedearlier this year that bitcoin’s hash rate in the summer would break the level of 70EH/s. To be clear, at several single points of time, bitcoin’s hash rate had already crossed that level in June and even reached 80EH/s around Aug. 1.
However, today marks the first time that the two-week average computing power has been able to remain above the 70EH/s threshold. As such, bitcoin’s mining difficulty has also set a new record of nearly 10 trillion.
