Bitcoin’s seeming unstoppable bull market has been fueled mainly by rising investor optimism regarding the looming Winklevoss ETF decision by the SEC, but a host of other fundamental factors has made the digital currency even more scarce in 2017.
On Friday (Mar. 3), the mining difficulty on the Bitcoin network is set to make its 10th consecutive increase since November 5, 2016. Blockchain statistics portal, BitcoinWisdom, estimates the next difficulty increase to be in the neighborhood of 6.36% to a record high of 468,791,624,875.
In layman's terms, Bitcoin miners will be receiving less coins after Friday’s difficulty bump. Friday’s projected difficulty increase may have been even higher if the hashrate of the Bitcoin network did not drop-off after February 25th, 2017, when it hit a record of 3.9 TH/s, according to charts by Blockchain.info:
At press time, BitcoinWisdom shows Bitcoin’s hashrate hovering around 3.4 TH/s.
Since the start of this year, and including this week’s increase, miners’ take has shrunk by roughly 40.89%, but this cut has been partly offset by the rising price (+27.47% in 2017) which hit a new all-time high today of $1231.00 at 10:05 a.m. EST, on European exchange Bitstamp.
Miner photo by Steve Rainwater
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