Decrease in mining power
The mining power of the bitcoin network has decreased considerably in the past month. While it still reached 55 exahashes per second at the end of August, an average of about 38 exahashes per second are now being calculated: a decrease of almost 25%.
The decrease in mining power, in addition to the usual variance, may be due to the declining bitcoin price. Profits previously earned from mining bitcoins have shrunk considerably in 2018. Possibly even so far that mining equipment has had to be turned off in order not to make a loss due to too high costs compared to the benefits.
Where the decrease seems significant, everything should be put in perspective. The decrease from 55 EH/s to 38 EH/s follows a nearly 400% increase in mining power since the beginning of this year. At the start of 2018, the network still counted 15 EH/s, which was a record that was head and shoulders above all previous hash records.
In January 2011, the network reached one terahash per second for the first time. That’s 1000000000000 – one trillion – hashes per second. Two years later, the 100 TH/s milestone was reached. Within two years after that, the network’s mining power grew from 100,000 TH/s to 1,000,000 TH/s: 1 exahash!
Difficulty
As a result of the decrease, the difficulty of mining has initiated the second largest drop in Bitcoin history. It became 15.13% easier to find the hash that entitles you to the block reward. This so-called difficulty adjustment takes place every 2016 blocks, about two weeks, to bring the average time to find a block to ten minutes.
