The next Bitcoin difficulty retarget, which is set for February 15, 2024, is expected to signal a significant upturn in the network. According to current estimates, there would be a projected difficulty jump ranging from 8.45% to 9.2%, which would be the biggest increase in 2024 so far.
Bitcoin Challenges Are Expected to Rise Sharply
This week is predicted to bring about a major increase in difficulty for mining bitcoin (BTC), maybe the biggest difficulty increase of the year. There have been three difficulty epochs in 2024 thus far—two hikes and one decrease. Block height 828,576 saw a 7.33% increase during the preceding upswing on February 2, 2024.
Current projections indicate that the upcoming increase may surpass the previous correction by up to 9.2%. Block production times are kept relatively near to an average of 10 minutes each block by the network’s difficulty adjustment mechanism. Based on the time needed to mine the previous epoch, this change takes place every 2,016 blocks. If the 2,016 blocks are mined in less than two weeks, then there will almost certainly be a rise.
On the other hand, if mining the epoch takes longer than two weeks, meaning that block durations have gotten longer than the typical 10 minutes, then difficulty should drop. For every block found, block intervals are currently averaging eight minutes and 45 seconds to nine minutes and seven seconds at block height 830,287. At 597 exahashes per second (EH/s), the seven-day simple moving average (SMA) of Bitcoin’s hashrate is steadily holding steady. 586.3 EH/s was the average hashrate for the mining of 2,016 blocks that occurred recently.
The fourth reward halving is expected to occur on or around April 19, 2024, with 9,715 blocks left. In the interim, miners have been pushing the network’s processing power and complexity to all-time highs every few weeks. This last week saw the hashrate reach an unprecedented peak, and the network difficulty peaked at an unprecedented 75.50 trillion. In the event that the minimal expected rise materializes, the difficulty is expected to surpass 80 trillion.
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