Despite the price being down more than 50% year to date, the total security of the Bitcoin protocol, or hashrate, reached a record high of 158 exahashes per second.
Bitcoin miners are unable to and will not stop. Despite a sharp price decline, the BTC hash rate keeps climbing to new records.
According to Braiins Insights, a provider of mining data tools and metrics, the hash rate for Bitcoin mining reached its highest level on October 4 at 258 exahashes per second (EH/s). Despite a 58% year-to-date decline in value vs the dollar, the mining hash rate has increased by 43%.
According to Bitcoin Gandalf of Braiins’ marketing department, “The hash rate hitting another all-time high shows that miners are bullish about the future prospects of Bitcoin.” Nonetheless, the current macroeconomic environment could pose an issue as “the present isn’t so rosy for Bitcoin miners,” Gandalf said, adding:
“Bitcoin continues to trade in this tight band between $19,000–$20,000 and this recent increase in hash rate will result in a sharp upward adjustment in mining difficulty meaning that miner margins will be further squeezed.”
Mining engineers and enthusiasts discussed the hash rate reaching all-time highs while the price is still low in a series of tweets. The following quote was provided by Upstream Data’s Rob W, a Bitcoin miner:
According to market expert Zack Voell, “XPs coming online” may be the cause of the rising hash rate. The most recent model from Bitmain, one of the most well-known manufacturers of Bitcoin mining equipment, is the S19 XP Antminer.
The term “hash rate” refers to the number of hashes generated every second. In terms of Bitcoin, the hash rate is a crucial security indicator that many miners pay close attention to.
Simply said, the more computer power or hashing that the network produces, the more secure Bitcoin is overall. Bitcoin is hence more resistant to attacks, the most frequent of which is referred to as a 51% attack.
The number of miners trying to solve legitimate blocks to get the current block reward of 6.25 BTC, or around $120,000, has been increasing. Every ten minutes on average, blocks are resolved and added to the Bitcoin network.
The rate at which blocks are solved is determined by the tough adjustment. Based on the rising hash rate, it fluctuates generally every two weeks and is anticipated to rise on October 10. After decreasing for the first time in March 2022, the difficulty adjustment has been steadily moving upward in 2022, indicating that blocks are generally becoming more difficult to solve.
In conclusion, even though Bitcoin’s price is still stuck below $20,000, more and more miners see value in maintaining the network. “With hash rate pushing to new all-time highs once again, despite all the claims to the contrary, it appears that #Bitcoin is still not dead,” said James Check, an analyst at Glassnode, in a tweet.
