After several years of continuous growth in difficulty and hashrate, Bitcoin is experiencing a strong withdrawal from the norm as larger mining operations start shutting down some of their older hardware and smaller ones disappear from the map.

By the numbers, this resulted in a 15.13% drop in mining difficulty registered today, following another drop of 7.39% on November 17. To put things into historical perspective, such a drop has not been seen since October 31, 2011 at 5:42 AM GMT, when mining difficulty took an 18.03% plunge following another 13.09% descent two weeks earlier, according to data taken from BTC.com.

Although this sounds like a doomsday scenario, it could help provide relief to mining operations that were starting to experience losses but were holding out for the difficulty adjustment. Operators with more efficient computers could start switching some of those ASICs on to make their hashrates more competitive.

The flipside of a difficulty purge

An opinion piece penned by Leavy School of Business professor of finance Atulya Sarin at MarketWatch said that the drop in mining profitability marks the collapse of Bitcoin’s value. He argues that most miners today aren’t concerned with the security of the ledger but ins…

This article appeared first on Cryptovest

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