Bitcoin Turns up the Heat: Difficulty Jumps Nearly 8% as Payouts Dip

Snagging BTC just got trickier. Saturday’s difficulty tweak pushed the level 7.96% higher, marking the ninth time it’s climbed this year, alongside five times it’s been dialed down. The difficulty figure is dimensionless—it simply shows how much tougher it is to discover a block now compared to Bitcoin’s easiest setting, which was pegged at difficulty 1 when the network launched. With the current level at 126.27 trillion, miners must crank out, on average, 126.27 trillion hashes to hit a winner that matches the network’s target and qualifies as a valid block. Before the adjustment, bitcoin mining brought in roughly $64.03 per petahash per second (PH/s). But following the difficulty bump, the hashprice slipped to $59.01.