Bitcoin difficulty rises as hashprice jumps 22%

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty increased in the most recent scheduled adjustment even as hashprice climbed roughly 22% and estimated network hashrate held near previous levels. The change affects all miners on the network and follows the protocol’s difficulty retarget.

Difficulty is recalculated using the time it took to mine the prior 2,016 blocks, a window that covers about two weeks. That calculation can produce a higher target even when short-term measures of computing power, measured as hashrate, do not show a large change.

Hashprice, a standard industry metric that expresses expected miner revenue per unit of hashrate (usually dollars per terahash per day), rose about 22% over the same period. The increase reflected a higher Bitcoin market price and stronger transaction fee revenue, both of which raise the dollar value of block rewards.

The difficulty increase requires miners to perform more hashing work on average to find a block, which lowers the probability of finding blocks per hash until the next retarget. At the same time, higher hashprice raises expected revenue per unit of hashing power, which can make older, less efficient rigs profitable again at current rates.

Estimated network hashrate appeared to stall rather than rise to meet the higher returns. Industry factors that can slow capacity additions include timing of new hardware deliveries, grid capacity limits at mining sites, seasonal variations in power availability, and operators choosing to bring equipment online gradually. Hashrate figures, typically reported in exahashes per second, are derived from recent block intervals and can lag short-term operational changes.

The protocol’s retarget mechanism aims to keep average block times near 10 minutes by adjusting difficulty roughly every two weeks. Hashprice is sensitive to Bitcoin’s USD price, block rewards and transaction fees; miners use it to estimate potential revenue for each unit of computational effort.