The Bitcoin difficulty dropped by 0.49% on February 12, 2023 after reaching an all time high of 39.35 trillion in the previous two weeks (2016 blocks). Miners are temporarily given a break due to the lower difficulty, as the network has posted an 14.94% increase in its monthly average.
Bitcoin Difficulty Decreases by 0.49% and the Top 5 mining pools continue dominating the majority of global hashrate
At the moment of writing, the Bitcoin difficulty decreased by 0.4% after a peak block of 776.160 and hashrate is moving to 289.14 EH/s. The current difficulty is lower than 0.49%. The network’s difficulty will be set at 39.16 Trillion hashes in the coming weeks.
The change in difficulty was caused by the shifting block times. These are the time intervals between blocks being mined. They have gone from 10 minutes 7 seconds to 11 minutes 14 seconds. Bitcoin’s next difficulty adjustment is Round 2 on February 26, 2023. The average hashrate in the 2016 blocks was approximately 280.6 exahash/second (EH/s). The average block time was 10 minutes and two seconds.
At present, Foundry USA is the most powerful mining pool with 33.26% of the global hashrate. That’s roughly 95.89 EH/s of hashpower. Foundry USA is followed by Antpool with 15.97% of computational power, Binance Pool with 15.54%, F2Pool with 14.22%, and Viabtc with 9.41%. These are the top five out of the total 12 known mining pools, which together control approximately 88.4% of the hashrate.
