BTC Mining Difficulty Is Nearing An All-Time High Soon

The miners’ machines are apparently on and hard at work as the BTC mining difficulty increases and is about to get more difficult. The Bitcoin news now show that this activity is reaching a new all-time high and increasing the operational costs to mine the coin.

Two industry players have weighed down their opinions on what might come next in this industry. The BTC mining difficulty is basically a measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards. This metric is about to reach two milestones: an all-time high and the never-before seen 17 T territory.

Current estimations by the mining pool BTC.com show that the mining difficulty will rise by 8.92% in little less than three days, skipping over the 16 T range this time and climbing to 17.19 T. This follows an unchanged difficulty level during the previous adjustment, and the highest jump in two years recorded in mid-June, which was preceded by the eight highest drop.

In other words, the latest cryptocurrencies news show that the last time the difficulty was above 16 T was May, before the third Bitcoin halving. However, the previous all-time high happened even before that and in early March this year, with 16.55 T.

The price of Bitcoin has been keeping steady in the lower $9,000 levels, without making any major swings. At the time of writing, the coin is changing hands in the $9,200 zone without much changes. Overall, the price of BTC is down by 6% in a month and down by 21% in a year.

Meanwhile, the BTC mining difficulty is adjusted every two weeks (every 2016 blocks to be precise) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. Since June 30, it was below 10 minutes and dropped below 9 minutes just yesterday.

“Experienced and industrial scale miners continue to mine profitably with the extremely popular old-generation Antminer S9 after firmware-level modifications that increase efficiency to meet their business models. They would continue to do so after the upcoming difficulty adjustment,” Zhuoer from the BTC.TOP mining pool said.

BTC.TOP accounts for around 70% of the total hash rate as the founder and CEO Jiang Zhuoer told the media a while ago. The experts from the pool do not expect the hash rate to change much this summer.