Bitcoin Set to Record Sharp Increase in Difficulty

Bitcoin (BTC), the world’s most popular cryptocurrency network, is slated to suffer a record-breaking difficulty rise in three days, on or around January 15, 2023. The network’s hash rate is currently 268.79 exahashes per second (EH/s), and on January 6, 2023, the blockchain’s computing power achieved an all-time high, peaking at 361.20 EH/s at block height 770,709

Bitcoin block durations, also known as block intervals, have ranged from 8 minutes and 52 seconds to 9 minutes and 6 seconds.

The actual time between blocks can differ from this average, and since the most recent difficulty change on January 2, 2023, at block height 770,112, block intervals have been faster. As a result, the difficulty retargeting on January 15 will be a significant increase, one that has not been seen since October 2022.

BTC’s network difficulty is approximately 34.09 trillion at the time of writing and will remain that way until the next difficulty change. This means that finding a valid BTC block and adding it to the blockchain takes 34 trillion hashes (or attempts) on average. According to current data, Bitcoin’s next difficulty change is expected to increase by 10.1% to 10.21% in three days.

According to the highest estimate, it would take bitcoin miners 37.57 trillion hashes to locate a block on the Bitcoin blockchain, and the difficulty would increase to an all-time high of 37.57 trillion.’

Foundry USA Controls the Largest Chunk of Bitcoin Hash Power

Foundry USA is currently the top mining pool over the last three days, accounting for 29.57% of the global hashrate. In second to sixth position are Antpool (19.36%), F2pool (16.38%), Binance Pool (8.72%), Viabtc (8.30%), and Braiins Pool (3.40%), in that order. Foundry and Antpool currently control 48.93% of the total hashrate on the network.