After an eight month streak of hashrate increases, raising difficulty by a total of 231%, the mining difficulty has dropped to 158,427,203,767.3917 (3.1% below the previous adjustment, placing total network hashrate estimates around 1.2 EH/s). During this adjustment period, unknown actors flooded memory pools with several dozen megabytes of spam. Unlike last time, when the spammers made grand claims from behind meaningless pseudonyms, they have remained anonymous this time around; and unlike previous attacks, which merely contributed to demand for block space, this one caused immediate economic consequences, as disclosed previously. The transaction fee total climbed to 726.63690949 Bitcoins, comprising 1.42% of total miner income.