Litecoin’s [LTC] mining difficulty reached a new high. The mining difficulty peaked at just below 18 million hashes, as per a Litecoin Foundation post published on CoinMarketCap on 4 November.
Miners compete by generating random hashes in order to find one that is less than the target set by the network’s mining algorithm. Those who win this race are rewarded for adding a new block to the Litecoin blockchain. This rise in mining difficulty most likely indicated that the competition for LTC’s miner rewards was heating up.
A walk down memory lane…
During the time of its launch in 2011, miners were rewarded with 50 LTC once they successfully mined one block. What was peculiar about the Litecoin mining procedure was that this reward witnessed halving every 840,000 blocks. This happened around every four years.
Currently, miners get 12.5 LTC and once the next halving takes place in 2023, this reward will reduce to 6.25 LTC.
Litecoin rallying high post the ETH merge
At press time, LTC was trading at $70.20 and was the 19th largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of more than $5 billion. As per Santiment, LTC managed to witness a good run since mid-June. Furthermore, the amount of addresses with more than 1,000 LTC witnessed a significant surge.
Source: Santiment
The LTC/BTC trading pair also witnessed a rise of over 51% since its 12 June low. Additionally, 314 new shark and whale addresses were also created since 27 May.
A major reason why Litecoin could remain attractive to the mining community would that the transition of Ethereum from a PoW to PoS.
ETH’s transition urged miners to focus more on cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin. As more and more cryptocurrencies move towards PoS, there would going to be a greater miners’ movement towards Litecoin.
Source: TradingView
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Source: https://ambcrypto.com/litecoins-mining-difficulty-may-be-the-bearer-of-good-news-for-ltc-investors/