Bitcoin Difficulty Set to Rise 3.82% to All-Time High of 39 Trillion Following Recent Increase

The Bitcoin network is set to record another meaningful difficulty increase on Sunday, Jan. 29, 2023, as current estimates expect it to rise 3.82% higher. The change follows the last difficulty retarget, which advanced by 10.26% to the current all-time high of 37.59 trillion.

Block Time Breakdown: How Faster Discovery is Impacting Bitcoin Difficulty

In just over a day, the Bitcoin network will see a difficulty increase of around 3.82%, according to current estimates. Right now, the mining difficulty is already at an all-time high (ATH) at 37.59 trillion, and with a 3.82% jump, it’s expected to be around 39.03 trillion. The number of hashes needed to mine a block is directly proportional to the difficulty level, which means each participating miner needs to perform 39.03 trillion hashes in order to mine a block at that level.

The average Bitcoin block time has been around 8:54 minutes to 9:31 minutes, which has been lower than the 10-minute average. This too is linearly related to the estimated increase expected on Jan. 29.

This is because when blocks are discovered faster than the 10-minute average, the 2,016 blocks in between difficulty retargets are also found faster than the two-week average. As a result, the Bitcoin protocol’s mining difficulty rises. With BTC’s price higher, a lot more hashrate has been dedicated to the blockchain.

Bitcoin’s hashrate is running high with an average of 278.2 exahash per second (EH/s) during the last 2,016 blocks. Foundry USA commands the top position in terms of mining pools with the most amount of dedicated SHA256 hashrate. Foundry has around 93.82 EH/s, over a three-day period, which accounts for 32.99% of the network’s computational power. The Bitcoin mining pool Antpool has dedicated 49.57 EH/s to the Bitcoin network over a three-day span, accounting for 17.43% of the hashpower.

What impact do you think this difficulty increase will have on the overall Bitcoin network and its miners? Share your thoughts in the comments below.