Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Hits Record High

The mining difficulty of the world’s largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has reached a lifetime high of 29.79 trillion.

Bitcoin has withstood an onslaught of sellers as it calmly rose to $39k despite a choppy broader market. Despite the volatility, its adoption continues and its mining difficulty has never been higher. Zooming out, mining difficulty has risen by approximately 30% since a year ago when the figures were around 23.58 trillion.

Mining Bitcoin Has Never Been More Difficult

According to the data compiled by BTC.com, the Bitcoin mining difficulty has hit a record high after rising by over 5% on April 27. Since the beginning of 2022, the metric has increased by nearly 23% as it underwent three positive readjustments and two negative ones. The next difficulty readjustment is slated for May 10.

Bitcoin’s network hash rate, on the other hand, fluctuated significantly closely following its price action. It even notched an all-time high of over 258 EH/s on the same day before settling near 222.68 EH/s.

Data from BTC.com further revealed that Foundry USA lead the chart contributing the most hash power – 17.05%. It was followed by AntPool with 14.28%, F2Pool with 13.86%, Poolin with 12.58%, ViaBTC with 11.73%, Binance with 11.30%, etc.

Embracing the Bitcoin Standard

Blockchain analysis platform, Glassnode, recently noted that bitcoins are being accumulated and both retail and professional investors are taking portions of the asset from exchanges and are willing to hold on to current prices on private and cold wallets.

This development comes even as the crypto market has continued to struggle in gaining any meaningful momentum in recent months. Besides, wallets with more than 1K BTC have also demonstrated an aggressive upwards move which could potentially signal big players beginning to re-accumulate again.

While some countries are still hung on to high taxation instead of bringing about regulatory clarity, a few others have taken a bold step towards addressing the latter. Over the past decade, several economically-challenged nations switched over to the US dollar. But excessive money printing is driving people away from these fiat currencies.

A prolonged period of high inflation, high unemployment rates, and stagnant aggregate demand has made the existing monetary tools futile. With investors now increasingly embracing Bitcoin, nations aren’t far behind. After El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender, the Central African Republic followed suit and went on to become the first country in Africa to do so.