When the flood season is one month late, the difficulty of bitcoin mining has risen to a record high.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measure of the difficulty of obtaining the reward for mining the largest cryptocurrency in this global market capitalization. As bitcoin prices have risen again, this indicator has recently reached a record high of 7.93 T, which is 7% higher than the 7.45 T record set in the last two weeks of the adjustment period and the highest level since October 2018 .

Based on the power deployed on the network, Bitcoin will adjust its mining difficulty every 2016 block (approximately 14 days). This is done to ensure that the block production interval in the next cycle can be kept constant at about 10 minutes. When there are not many mining equipment to verify the transaction to obtain the bitcoin reward, the mining difficulty will be reduced, and when the network When there are more mining equipment, the difficulty of mining will increase. The chart below is a bitcoin mining difficulty chart from BTC.com:

Obviously, the buzzing bitcoin mining machine is now getting more and more. According to data from mine tank operator BTC.com, the average power of global bitcoin miners in the past 14 days has reached 56.77 EH / s, everyone is "crazy" mining.

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BTC.com's data further indicates that the average mining power of bitcoin in the first 24 hours of this writing reached 59.58 EH/s, and the average mining power on the 3rd was 59.70 EH/s, higher than May 15 – The average calculation power on June 27 was 56.77 EH/s.

Similarly, Blockchain.info's data also shows that the total computing power of Bitcoin as of June 22 has reached 66 EH/s, exceeding the highest record of 61.86 EH/s last year. The cryptocurrency market entered a long bear market last year. In December 2018, the total network computing power was reduced to a "poor" 31 EH/s, but it has more than doubled.

Assume that all recent new computing power comes from common mining equipment on the market – such as the AntMiner S9 with a power of about 14 TH/s, meaning that at least 2 million mines have been deployed in the market over the past few months. Machine (EH/s equals 1 million TH/s).

The increase in mining capacity is in line with the pace of bitcoin price increases in the first half of the year. This market trend has also doubled the price of domestic second-hand mining machines and stimulated the demand for new mining machines.

BTC.com further estimates that the difficulty of bitcoin mining is expected to increase by another 7% at the beginning of the next adjustment cycle. If this is the case, this means that bitcoin mining will be difficult for the first time to cross the 8 T threshold.

The flood season is one month late

The main factor in the increase in computing power comes from the domestic bitcoin mines, especially with the arrival of summer, the bitcoin mines in the southwest have deployed a large number of mining equipment.

According to a report released by blockchain research firm Coinshare, as of the beginning of this month, 50% of the world's bitcoin computing power came from Sichuan Province. However, it is worth noting that the arrival of the rainy season in the southwestern China has been delayed by nearly a month compared to previous years. As a result, some local mines have operated less than half of the mining equipment in the past month.

Bitcoin miner Hashage CEO has deployed multiple mines in the southwestern provinces of China, but he has revealed that there have been no more than 20 days of rain in the region since the beginning of May, which is very unusual. He said:

“In the past few years, the southwestern part of the country usually started to rain from May and then lasted for more than a month, so local hydropower stations usually have enough water before the beginning of June.”

Although the company's ASIC mining machine only operated 40% of its capacity in early June this year. Fortunately, from the past two weeks, the rain has once again landed in the southwestern part of China. With the arrival of the flood season, the proportion of Hashage's mining capacity has climbed to more than 60%.

Previously, many domestic mines estimated that Bitcoin's total network computing power would break through the 70 EH/s mark during the rainy season peak around August this year, which means that if the mining equipment is AntMiner S9 or the same type of equipment, at least Activate another 300,000 mining equipment.

In addition, some new admission capital is also looking forward to the arrival of the flood season as soon as possible.

This article is from Coindesk, original author | Wolfie Zhao

Translator | Moni

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