On February 12, the bitcoin network difficulty decreased minimally, by exactly 0.49%. Nevertheless, it can now be expected that fOn February 24, a serious increase may occur, probably the highest increase of this year so far. This will be a serious number, considering that the biggest increase in difficulty so far happened on January 15, when the height of block 772128 increased by 10.26%.
It will be extremely difficult to find bitcoin blocks from now on
The current situation is a serious change compared to the years. After all, in 2022, the hash rate of bitcoin was in the range of 200 exahashes per second. In 2023, however, it will probably be at the height of 300 exahashes per second. Statistics show that for the last 2016 block, bitcoin’s hash rate was 310.5 exahashes per second. The production time of the blocks in this interval ranged from 8 minutes 55 seconds to 9 minutes 8 seconds. Which means a significant acceleration compared to the well-known 10-minute average. And if we are somewhat familiar with the calculation method of network difficulty, then we can know that a high hash rate and a fast block production speed predict an increase in difficulty.
The current estimates show that the adjustment on February 24 will be somewhere between 10.7% and 11.5%. The current difficulty is roughly 39.16 trillion hashes (i.e. experiments) and with the next adjustment this number will likely go above 40 trillion. After all, if we assume a 10.78% increase, it will already be over 43 trillion hashes. The bottom line is that following February 24th, it will definitely be much more difficult for miners to find new blocks. At the time of writing, Foundry USA is responsible for 33.33% of the network’s hash rate, and Antpool’s is 18.66%. So these two pools have a pretty heavy share of the total network hash rate.
