As the price of bitcoin passes $1000 for the second time in 2017, the mining power of the global network of interconnected computers maintaining the integrity the digital currency has been increasing at an even faster pace.
According to Blockchain.info charts, the hashrate of the Bitcoin network - the amount of mining calculations taking place every second across the globe - reached an all-time high of 3,750,587 TH/s on January 31, 2017:
This is the biggest one-day spike in the hashrate of the Bitcoin network! On Jan. 30, the hashrate was 2,832,475 TH/s.
To put this figure into perspective, 1 TH/s is equivalent to one trillion calculations per second!
The difficulty of mining a whole block of bitcoin, which adjusts every 2016 blocks, is estimated to jump by 11.51 percent in about two days, according to blockchain statistics site BitcoinWisdom.com.
The last difficulty adjustment, which took place on January 22, upped the difficulty figure by 16.64 percent. This was the largest spike since February 7, 2016, when the difficulty on the Bitcoin network shot up by 20.06 percent.
Since February of 2016, the difficulty of mining a block of bitcoin has almost tripled. With the next difficulty adjustment in about 2 days, bitcoin miners all over the world that are running the same mining devices as they did at the beginning of last year, would be mining only ⅓ of the amount they could in February of last year.
Mining farm image by Marko Ahtisaari
