On December 9 2023 there was a development, in the Bitcoin BTC -1.13% mining landscape. When block height reached 820,512 the difficulty rating for Bitcoin mining dropped by 0.96%. This was the decrease since September 19 2023. Put an end to a series of six consecutive difficulty increases.
The new difficulty rating now stands at 67.31 trillion. Is expected to remain unchanged for the 12 days until December 23 2023. While this decrease theoretically makes it slightly easier for miners to find block rewards it hasn’t led to an increase in the networks power.
Whats worth noting is that the total computational power used for mining and processing Bitcoin transactions also known as hashrate started declining a days before this difficulty adjustment occurred. On December 4 2023 the seven day average hashrate was measured at around 507 exahash per second (EH/s). However by December 11th of the year this average had dropped significantly to approximately472 EH/s—a decrease of about6.9% over just three days. This decline in hashrate also coincided with a reduction, in hash price—the revenue generated per unit of power used.
The average rate of mining power measured in petahashes, per second (PH/s) dropped by than 20% from its peak of $111 per PH/s on December 6 to $88.41 per PH/s over the past seven days.
These changes in Bitcoins mining difficulty and hashrate trends are happening as the cryptocurrency community looks forward to the halving event, which is expected to take place around April 20 2024. During this event the block reward will be reduced from the 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block which will have an impact, on mining economics and potentially affect the overall Bitcoin market.