While Bitcoin’s hash rate has remained above 200 exahash per second (EH/s), the network’s mining difficulty has been at an all-time high (ATH) of 31.25 trillion for the past two weeks. However, after 289 blocks or about two days later, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is estimated to drop by 3.67%, giving miners some relief after the recent difficulty ATH.
At the time of writing, the Bitcoin (BTC) network has a network hash rate of around 210 to 225 EH/s after reaching ATH on May 2, 2022. On that day, Bitcoin’s hash rate reached 275.01 EH/s at block height 734,577.
Additionally, the blockchain network’s difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) has tripled since April 27 and hit an all-time high of 31.25 trillion on May 10. The difficulty height makes it the most difficult period ever to mine BTC and DAA, with the price of BTC down more than 23% in the past 30 days.
Bitcoin miners are still profitable, but data from asicminervalue.com shows that using today’s BTC exchange rate and electricity costs of $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), only 27 mining rigs are profitable today. Antiminer S19 Pro+ Hyd from Bitmain. An estimated profit of 198 terahash per second (TH/s) is about $8.93 per day.
A Canaan Avalonminer 1246 with 90 TH/s can earn about $1.34 in BTC profit per day. While difficulty is higher than ever and prices are lower, Bitcoin miners may take a two-day break when the DAA changes.
At least as of this writing, the estimated difficulty change is likely to drop by 3.67% after 289 blocks are mined. After two days, the difficulty will drop from 31.25 trillion ATH to 30.11 trillion. Of course, the estimated DAA may increase or decrease over the time it takes to mine 289 Bitcoin blocks.
Meanwhile, for the past three days, Foundry USA has been the mining pool with the highest number of blocks and hash rates found among Bitcoin mining pools. Foundry has a computing power of 45.92 EH/s, which is equivalent to 21.80% of BTC’s computing power. Over the past three days, mining operations have found 87 blocks out of 399.
Bitmain’s AntPool controls 14.29% of the global computing power or 30.08 EH/s. Antpool discovered about 57 of the 399 blocks over a three-day period. Today, there are only 12 known mining pools dedicated to providing computing power to the BTC network, 0.25% of which is operated by stealth miners.
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Jamie Redman
Jamie Redman is Head of News for Bitcoin.com News and a fintech reporter based in Florida. Redman has been an active member of the cryptocurrency community since 2011. He is passionate about Bitcoin, open source code and decentralized applications. Since September 2015, Redman has written over 5,000 articles for Bitcoin.com News on the disruptive protocols emerging today.
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