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Bitcoin mining difficulty reaches new all-time high
On Friday, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty, a metric reflecting the relative complexity of adding new blocks to the ledger, reached a new all-time high of 142.3 trillion.
In August and September, the metric consecutively hit new record levels due to an influx of additional computational power.
According to CryptoQuant, Bitcoin’s hashrate — the average total computational power securing the decentralized protocol — also reached an all-time high on Friday, surpassing 1.1 trillion hashes per second.
The increasing mining difficulty and the constant need for energy-intensive, high-performance computing power to secure the network make competition between individual miners and corporations more challenging, raising concerns that Bitcoin mining is becoming increasingly centralized.
Small-scale miners and even publicly traded companies face growing competition from governments with access to free energy resources, as well as energy infrastructure providers who can vertically integrate Bitcoin mining into their business operations.
For instance, in May, the Pakistani government announced plans to allocate 2,000 megawatts of surplus energy for Bitcoin mining as part of the country’s transition to regulating cryptocurrencies and digital assets. Meanwhile, electricity providers in the U.S. state of Texas are integrating Bitcoin mining into their infrastructure to help balance grid loads in cooperation with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).
See also: "Bitcoin miner Hut 8 announces launch of four new sites in the US"
