Fresh data reveals that the mining difficulty of Bitcoin may be about to increase dramatically. Specifically, this news comes from a tweet by the notable analyst Kevin Rooke. If this is true, it could be a very bullish sign for Bitcoin and the price of the premier cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin mining difficulty will hit new all-time high in Q3 of 2019

After uploading both past and future projections of Bitcoin metrics to Twitter, Kevin Rooke said that the difficulty of Bitcoin might be about to increase substantially. After comparing these statistics, Rooke went on to state that Bitcoin’s difficulty has been growing continuously the last three years.

In fact, Rooke notes that Bitcoin’s difficulty has already been increasing around 42% each quarter since 2016. Even more notably, growth in Bitcoin’s difficulty has been positive nearly every quarter since 2016, with the exception of Q4 in 2018.

This blip came during one of the lowest points during Bitcoin’s bear market. Now, however, it is clear that growth during the coming quarter looks to be one of the most impressive yet. This comes as 2019 has already shown a steep increase in the difficulty of Bitcoin mining.

“Difficulty is projected to grow 60% this quarter, and it was already at an all-time high when Q2 ended,” Rooke notes in an accompanying comment. According to the following chart, of the all-time difficulty chart of Bitcoin, 2019 has had an almost vertical increase in Bitcoin’s difficulty.

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty, from blockchain.info

This comes amid other bullish signs

In fact, if these projections come true, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty will have nearly doubled between the end of 2018 and the end of Q3 2019. Put simply, the mining difficulty refers to the effort required to solve the equations that underpin and verify blocks of Bitcoin transactions.

Moreover, it also directly impacts the ease – or difficulty – with which miners can unlock block rewards. In addition to this, the number of miners – i.e. the difficulty – of the Bitcoin network relates to the Bitcoin mining difficulty.

This is done in order to incentives competition and participation on the Bitcoin network – as the difficulty would decrease if participation suddenly drops. The Bitcoin mining difficulty is one of the core metrics for gauging the state of the Bitcoin network.

The prospect that the Bitcoin mining difficulty will increase greatly in Q3 of 2019 is accompanied by another bullish metric. In fact, Bitcoin’s hash rate has also been seeing new all-time highs lately – crossing 102 quintillion hashes per second just this week.

Image Source: Forbes