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May 20, 2020 02:41 pm

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Drops by 6% In First Adjustment After Halving

The Bitcoin network just fine-tuned a key parameter to coax back miners who quit after last week's halving hammered their profits. From a report: More than 20 exahashes per second (EH/s) of computing power -- the equivalent of around 1.5 million older-generation mining machines -- has been switched off from Bitcoin since the network's halving. The 7-day rolling average of Bitcoin's hash rate has dropped over 20% from around 122 EH/s just prior to the halving on May 11 to now 97 EH/s. The once-in-four-years event reduced miners' block rewards from 12.5 to 6.25 bitcoin (BTC) per block. The hash rate drop after the halving has significantly outrun the hashing sprint prior to it. As such, Bitcoin's mining difficulty, which measures how hard it is to compete for block rewards, decreased 6% to 15.14 Trillion at 2:00 UTC on Wednesday in the network's first biweekly difficulty adjustment since the halving. The amount of computing power connected to Bitcoin has been on a roller-coaster ride over the past two weeks. Bitcoin's mining difficulty adjusts itself every 2,016 blocks, roughly 14 days, to ensure the average interval between blocks remains at 10 minutes. If a large number of miners are switched off from the network, resulting in a longer-than-10-minute average block interval, the difficulty will decrease to encourage participation. And Bitcoin's third halving on May 11 happened exactly at the halfway mark of the previous 2,016-block difficulty cycle.

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