• Bitcoin mining difficulty has surpassed 50 trillion hashes for the first time ever, increasing competition and security for the Bitcoin network.
• Mining difficulty means greater energy input is required to mine Bitcoin, leading to higher costs for miners.
• Mining stocks have underperformed Bitcoin significantly over the last year.
What is Bitcoin Mining Difficulty?
If not for the Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment, blocks would be appended to the blockchain at an increasing speed as more miners joined the network. In order to prevent this, an automatic algorithm adjusts mining difficulty so that blocks are appended to the blockchain at consistent 10 minute intervals. This explains why it was possible to mine on a laptop in the early days of Bitcoin – because there were few miners and hence low mining difficulty.
What Does Increasing Mining Difficulty Mean?
Mining difficulty increases as more computational power is put towards Bitcoin mining, also known as hash rate. This means that most of today’s mining is done with supercomputers and public companies carrying out the task, while stories of individuals finding (or losing) old stashes of Bitcoin on hard drives are rare due to high current mining difficulty.
Impact On Security & Profit
Higher mining difficulty means less profit for miners but also greater security for the network since it prevents malicious actors from easily adding blocks to it; however energy input needed to mine increases leading up higher costs for miners.
Impact On Stocks
Mining stocks have underperformed compared to Bitcoin significantly over the last year as buying into crypto has become increasingly popular among investors worldwide looking for lucrative returns in a relatively short period of time, instead of investing in long-term assets such as traditional stocks or bonds.
Conclusion
Bitcoin’s rising mining difficulty signifies its growing popularity and value since more people are investing into cryptocurrency than ever before, making it increasingly difficult but also secure to mine new tokens and add them onto its immutable blockchain ledger system.