Bitcoin’s security hits new all-time high despite market downturn
Reuters • November 08, 2022
Bitcoin mining has become more difficult than ever. The network's difficulty increased 14% to a new all-time high of 35.6 trillion on Monday despite a lagging price causing reduced mining income.
The difficulty of mining bitcoins refers to how many attempts, or guesses, a miner must make in order to generate the cryptographic string that grants it permission to add the subsequent block of transactions to the chain. The increase in difficulty on Monday was the biggest since a 22% increase in May.
Mining income is down 53% from the beginning of the year, indicating that miners have been particularly severely impacted by the bear market. However, more efficient computing units combined with a lower marginal cost for electricity through more renewables allows the difficulty to go up, even when the rewards for mining are going down with a lower BTC asset price.
The only time in history where these two variables were not strong enough to increase the hash-rate is in the time when Bitcoin mining got banned in China, reducing the hash-rate from 175 eHash/s to 75 eHash/s. However, this decrease quickly got recovered by new mining participants taking over their place, and https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-ban-forces-some-bitcoin-miners-flee-overseas-others-sell-out-2021-06-25/Chinese minerVs moving their operations overseas in record time.