Bitcoin network mining difficulty, a metric tracking the relative challenge of adding recent blocks to the Bitcoin (BTC) ledger, fell by approximately 11.16% over the past 24 hours, the worst decline in a single adjustment period since China’s 2021 cryptocurrency mining ban.
The bitcoin mining difficulty is 125.86 T and became effective in block 935.429, data from CoinWarz can be seen. The average block time is over 11 minutes, exceeding the target of 10 minutes.
According to CoinWarz, during the next correction on February 23, the difficulty is expected to drop again by approximately 10.4% to 112.7 tons.
China announced a cryptocurrency mining ban and began enforcing crackdowns on digital assets in May 2021, which resulted in several downward revisions in the distress range from May to July 2021, ranging from 12.6% to 27.9%, according to CoinWarz historical data.
The pointed downward correction came amid a broad cryptocurrency market downturn that sent Bitcoin’s price crashing more than 50% from an all-time high of over $125,000 to a low of $60,000, as well as a winter storm in the U.S. that caused a transient miners’ outage.
Related: Bitcoin’s “exodus of miners” may cause the BTC price to drop below 60,000. dollars
Winter Storm Fern is moving through the United States and reducing miners’ hashrate
In January, a severe winter storm blew through the United States, affecting 34 states across 2,000 square miles, with snow, ice and freezing temperatures that disrupted electrical infrastructure.
Disruptions to the power grid caused U.S.-based Bitcoin miners to temporarily reduce their power consumption and halt operations, reducing the network’s total hashrate, or the amount of computing power used by miners to secure the Bitcoin protocol.
Foundry USA, a U.S.-based mining group and the world’s largest by hashrate, briefly lost about 60% of its hashing power as a result of Winter Storm Fern.
In response to the storm, the total hash power of the mining pool dropped from almost 400 exahashes per second (EH/s) to approximately 198 EH/s.
Foundry USA’s hashrate has increased to over 354 EH/s, which is the hash power of the mining pool at the time of writing, and still holds 29.47% of the market share, According to to the hashrate index.
However, the total hashrate of the Bitcoin network fell to a four-month low in January as cryptocurrency market conditions deteriorated and miners moved operations to AI data centers and other forms of high-performance computing.
Warehouse: Bitcoin Mining Industry ‘Will Die in 2 Years’: Bit Digital CEO
