Bitcoin mining difficulty sees sharpest increase since May 2021 despite slow price gains

Although the price of Bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is recording only minor gains, the competition among its miners has been growing, with mining difficulty reaching a new all-time high.

Specifically, the Bitcoin mining difficulty as of October 10 was 35.61 trillion, which is not only its new all-time high, but also the sharpest increase since May 13, 2021 (+13.55%), despite the price of Bitcoin growing only 0.49% in the past seven days, according to BTC.com data.

As a reminder, Bitcoin mining difficulty on May 13, 2021, grew by 21.53%, to 25.05 trillion. It is also worth noting that network difficulty measures how difficult it is to mine a Bitcoin block, with high difficulty meaning it takes more computing power to mine the same number of blocks and make the network secure.

Calm before the storm

Meanwhile, some indicators are pointing to an upcoming price volatility for the flagship digital asset.

The main indicator is a cooldown in Bitcoin’s volatility, especially in comparison to traditional stocks. Indeed, the volatility of the maiden cryptocurrency has recently dropped lower than that of the Dow Jones index.

According to crypto trading expert and analyst Michaël van de Poppe, Bitcoin’s volatility index is below 25 has historically been “a guaranteed recipe for massive volatility,” either going up or down. 

Another indicator is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI) reports that are set to come out this week, leading Van de Poppe to suggest “serious volatility” could be coming along.

At the same time, crypto analyst Ali Martinez noted that “Bitcoin losing the $19,000 support level can spell trouble,” as he earlier referred to it as “the most significant support level where 1.3 million addresses bought over 680,000 BTC.”

Bitcoin price analysis

As things stand, Bitcoin is currently trading at $19,368, representing a drop of 0.82% on the day, but still a modest increase of 0.76% across the previous week.

The market capitalization of the crypto’s largest asset by this indicator at press time stood at $370.46 billion, according to CoinMarketCap data retrieved by Finbold on October 10.

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