How The Bitcoin Difficulty Adjustment Has Boosted Miners’ Bottom Line

Data shows the recent large negative Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment has provided a significant boost to the miners’ revenues.

Bitcoin Miners Observe Big Boost In Revenues After Difficulty Decrease

As per the latest weekly report from Arcane Research, the BTC miner revenues have seen a 15% growth over the last seven days alone.

A relevant indicator here is the “mining hashrate,” which measures the total amount of computing power connected to the network.

This metric can be thought of as a representation of the competition present among the miners. Thus, rising values of the metric imply an increasing competition between the individual mining machines.

There is a feature of the BTC blockhain that the “block production rate” (that is, the rate of hashing new blocks) has to aim for a constant value. However, whenever the hashrate changes, so does the ability of miners to produce blocks.

For example, a rise in the hashrate means more rigs are present on the network now, and so the block production rate gets faster. To counteract this, the Bitcoin chain increases what’s known as the “mining difficulty.”

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After such an adjustment takes place, the miners find it harder to hash transactions and so their rate is slowed down to the required level.

Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the BTC hashrate over the past year:

Looks like the hashrate has gone down recently | Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 29, 2022

As you can see in the above graph, the Bitcoin hashrate has now fallen 15% from the all-time high set back in June.

A consequence of this decline has been that the mining difficulty has faced three consecutive adjustments, the latest of which has been the largest such adjustment in over a year.

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Thanks to the lowered difficulty, BTC miners have observed an uplift in their revenues. Just last week, the daily miner revenues had fallen below $18 million, the lowest value since November 2020.

The below table shows how the various BTC miner-related metrics have changed during the past week.

The fees per day seems to have fallen by almost 4% during this period | Source: Arcane Research's The Weekly Update - Week 29, 2022

From the table, it’s apparent that miner revenues have jumped by more than 15% over the last seven days as they stand at $20 million per day currently.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price floats around $21.4k, down 10% in the last week.

The value of the crypto has declined during the last few days | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Brian Wangenheim on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Arcane Research