On Dec. 5, 2022, at block height 766,080, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty adjustment dropped 7.32% lower, making it the largest difficulty reduction in 2022. The current difficulty is approximately 34.24 trillion and it will remain at this point for the next two weeks or 2,016 blocks.
Bitcoin Miners Catch a Break as the Network’s Difficulty Drops 7.32% Lower
Bitcoin’s difficulty retarget has dropped, which makes it a bit easier for bitcoin miners to find a block than it was during the two weeks prior. The difficulty change occurred around 8:50:29 p.m. (ET), at block height 766,080 and it was the largest reduction this year. The difficulty reduction was larger than the prior record that was recorded at block height 745,920. At that time on July 21, 2022, the network’s difficulty dropped by 5.01% and the difficulty was around 27.69 trillion.
Prior to the 7.32% reduction down to 34.24 trillion, the network’s difficulty rating was at a lifetime high of 36.95 trillion. Satoshi created the difficulty retarget to change periodically or every 2,016 blocks so the average time to mine a block remains constant at around 10 minutes. Statistics show prior to block height 766,080, the average block time was around 10:48 minutes, which meant a notable difficulty reduction was predicted to happen prior to the change.
At the time of writing, at 9:00 p.m. (ET), the total hashrate associated with the Bitcoin network is around 271.33 exahash per second (EH/s). Foundry USA is the top bitcoin mining pool at the time of writing with 25.48% of the network or 64.47 EH/s. Foundry discovered 107 blocks out of 420 discovered in the last three days. Foundry is followed by the mining pools Antpool, F2pool, Binance Pool, and Viabtc respectively.
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