The drop is likely a result of miners unplugging their machines due to high energy costs, said Compass Mining CEO Whitt Gibbs.Read MoreFeedzy
The difficulty of mining a bitcoin block dropped 0.35% on Thursday, the second time this month, after a consistent climb since November.
On March 3, mining difficulty dropped 1.5%, data from information platform Glassnode shows.
The difficulty adjusts automatically relative to the computing power on the network, also known as the hashrate, to keep the time between each mined block relatively stable at 10 minutes.
The bitcoin mining hashrate has dropped from an all-time high in February of 248 exahash/second (EH/s) to 216 EH/s on March 17, according to data from Glassnode.
“This slight drop is likely due to unprofitable miners unplugging ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). As energy prices increase globally, we will likely see more ASICs fall off the network,” Compass Mining founder and CEO Whitt Gibbs told CoinDesk in a Telegram message on Friday.
Electricity prices are soaring across the world as one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, Russia, is enthralled in a war with Ukraine, and global energy supply chains are being severed by sanctions.
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