Bitcoin Miners Catch a Break as Mining Difficulty Drops for the First Time in 3 Months – On March 3, bitcoin miners got a small break when the network’s mining difficulty dropped for the first time since November 28, 2021.
Over the last week, Bitcoin’s hashrate has remained high, ranging between 180 and 220 exahash per second (EH/s), but the leading crypto asset’s price has dropped more than 3% in the last 24 hours.
Bitcoin’s hashrate remains high, with the network’s processing power hovering around 189.56 EH/s (189,564,917,409,516,800,000 hashes per second (H/s) at the time of writing. Following a minor reduction in hashpower five days ago, the hashrate has been hovering at 180 to 220 EH/s for the last seven days.
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Estimates at the time projected a 1.18 percent increase in mining difficulties to 27.64 trillion dollars. The difficulty change at block height 725,760 on March 3, 2022, however, reduced for the first time in months.
In actuality, the network’s last mining difficulty decrease was 96 days ago, on November 28, 2021. The drop on Thursday was 1.49 percent, bringing the difficulty down to 27.55 trillion dollars.
While the adjustment isn’t significant, it does make it 1.49 percent easier for bitcoin miners to find a BTC block subsidy, also known as a block reward. Prior to the decline, the network has had six straight mining difficulty increases, making it far more difficult for miners to locate block rewards.
The 1.49 percent difficulty fall on March 3 is beneficial, but 24-hour statistics reveal that BTC’s value has dropped 3.8 percent against the US dollar at the time of writing.
Bitmain’s Antminer S19 Pro (110 TH/s), Microbt’s Whatsminer M30S++ (112 TH/s), and Canaan’s Avalonminer 1246 (90 TH/s) profits are all down from last week due to Bitcoin’s (BTC) current currency value.
Using current BTC pricing and paying $0.12 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for power, the aforementioned mining machines earn $8.24 to $12.75 per day. With today’s BTC rates and paying $0.12 per kWh, mining equipment like Innosilicon’s T2 Turbo+ (32 TH/s) and Bitmain’s Antminer S11 (20.5 TH/s) are not profitable.
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Foundry USA has been the top mining pool in the world for the last three days, with 18.41% of global hashrate and 36.49 EH/s of processing power. Foundry USA, a US mining business, has been a top miner for weeks this year, and the pool has 79 block rewards in the last 72 hours.
Bitmain’s Antpool, with 15.62 percent of worldwide hashrate over the three-day period, is the second-largest mining pool.
Antpool used 30.95 EH/s of processing power to find 67 blocks in 72 hours. There are now 11 known BTC mining pools, with unknown hashrate commanding 1.64 percent of global BTC hashpower and 3.24 EH/s SHA256 processing power.
