Highlights

Bitcoin’s hash rate reached another all time high yet gain

This can be correlated with the release of new S17 Antminers with increased efficiency

The computing power dedicated to mining bitcoin has hit yet another new high, suggesting that more than 600,000 powerful new machines may have come online in the last three months. This could be accounted for by the new S17 series of enhanced ASICs

According to data from crypto mining pool BTC.com, bitcoin’s two-week average hash rate has crossed another major threshold, reaching 85 exahashes per second (EH/s) (1 EH/s = 1 million TH/s. )Meanwhile, mining difficulty also adjusted to a new record of nearly 12 trillion.

Notably, both figures have jumped 60 percent since June 14, 2019.

Increases in the network’s hash rate also often mean that its energy consumption increases. Still, cryptocurrency investment products and research firm CoinShares recently estimated that 74.1% of bitcoin mining is powered by renewable energy.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty – a measure of how hard it is to create a block of transactions – adjusts after 2,016 blocks, or roughly every two weeks. This is to ensure the time to produce a block remains around 10 minutes, even as the amount of hashing power, deployed by machines around the globe competing to win freshly minted bitcoins, fluctuates.

Bitcoin’s spiking hash rate and difficulty are in line with the soaring price since earlier this year, which led to increasing demand for mining equipment that has significantly outstripped supply.