Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Level Drops 5%

The mining difficulty level of Bitcoin recorded a drop of 5.01% at a block height of 745,920 at 2:14 p.m. on July 21^st, 2022. This outpaced the last two changes that had occurred. This latest decline in the difficulty level means that it is now 5% easier for miners to find blocks than it had been in the last two weeks. Since June 22^nd, the bitcoin mining difficulty level had come down by 8.77%.

A break for bitcoin miners

Things are looking up for bitcoin miners this week because it was the third one in which the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) had shifted downwards. The difficulty of the network is calculated by measuring exactly how difficult it is for miners to find the right hash for each block.

After every 2,016 blocks have been found, the difficulty epoch is adjusted and the difficulty level goes up if the blocks are mined quickly and it goes down if it takes longer for people to mine the said number of blocks. The last time the difficulty level had gone up was on June 8^th, when it had climbed by 1.29% when the block height had hit 739,872.

Prior reductions

There had been two declines in the DAA in the four weeks before the most recent change. The first one had been seen on June 22^nd, when bitcoin mining difficulty had fallen by 2.35% when the block height hit 741,888.

The second change in difficulty occurred on July 6^th, when it recorded a drop of 1.41% and 743,904 was the block height. This is when the difficulty level was at 29.15 trillion, but after the latest drop, it has come down to 27.69 trillion. This level had not been seen since March 17^th of this year.

Current level

At the time of writing, it has become easier for miners to mine a bitcoin block by 11.39% than it had been on May 10^th, when the difficulty level had reached an all-time high and 735,840 had been the block height. This is when it had reached 31.25 trillion, but the network has already seen about 3.56 trillion wiped out.

Before the most recent adjustment in the difficulty level, the last two weeks saw Bitcoin’s hashrate had reached an average of 197.4 exahash per second (EH/s). The most blocks had been mined by Foundry USA in the last 30 days. A total of 4,165 blocks had been mined in the previous month and 926 of them were mined by Foundry USA.

The hashrate of the company in the previous month had been about 22.33% of the entire network. Antpool came at the second spot, as it managed to uncover 638 block rewards, 606 blocks were mined by F2pool and 505 blocks were mined by Binance Pool. 434 of the block rewards in the last 30 days were captured by Pooling. 4,108 blocks were also mined by 13 mining operations that are unknown. As far as stealth miners are concerned, they managed to mine a total of 57 blocks.