Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Falls By Over 11% In Steepest Drop Since China’s 2021 Mining Ban

Mining difficulty on the Bitcoin blockchain has dropped by the most since China’s 2021 ban on crypto mining.

Mining difficulty is an average measure of how many hash operations miners must perform to mine a block. According to data from the Bitcoin network explorer Mempool, the difficulty decreased by approximately 11.2%. That’s the most since the China mining ban five years ago, when the hashrate, the total computational power used to mine blocks, dived 50% to 58 exahashes per second (EH/s) and BTC was gyrating around $30,000.

China declared a sweeping ban on crypto mining and started implementing a crackdown on cryptocurrencies in May 2021, leading to multiple negative difficulty adjustments between May and July 2021, ranging between 12.6% and 27.9%, historic data from CoinWarz shows.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty stands at 125.86 trillion — down from 141.67T and took effect at block 935,429. This was also the 10th-largest negative percentage adjustment of all time.

The difficulty is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks to ensure that blocks continue to be mined at roughly 10-minute intervals. Prior to the latest difficulty adjustment, average block times hovered at approximately 11.4 minutes, slightly above the network’s 10-minute target.

The sharp downward adjustment came amid a broad crypto market rout. The price of Bitcoin recently fell by over 50% from its all-time peak of around $126,000 to $60,000 lows, spurred by massive spot BTC exchange-traded fund (ETF) outflows and a wider risk-off sentiment across stocks and commodities.

The drop in mining difficulty provides some relief for miners by slightly improving the chances that each unit of computing power will secure a block reward. However, whether that provides meaningful financial relief will largely depend on Bitcoin’s price trajectory in the coming period.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $69,661, up 0.88% over the past 24 hours. It’s now roughly 9.9% lower than it was a week ago, according to crypto price aggregator TradingView.