BTC Mining Difficulty Hits an All-Time High with 8th Straight Positive Adjustment.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has surged to a record high of 110.45 trillion, highlighting the network’s increasing robustness and competitiveness. This figure means mining a block is now 110.45 trillion times harder than when the network began with the genesis block in 2009.

The difficulty adjustment, which occurs every 2,016 blocks, is designed to ensure blocks are mined approximately every 10 minutes, regardless of fluctuations in the network’s total computational power. The latest adjustment marks the eighth consecutive increase in difficulty, intensifying the pressure on miners as the process of earning rewards becomes increasingly competitive.

This trend has pushed some publicly traded miners to seek alternative revenue streams. Companies like MARA Holdings (MARA) have issued convertible bonds to purchase bitcoin and have turned to lending their bitcoin holdings to generate yield. Others have expanded into high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) to diversify and stabilize income.

This isn’t the first time Bitcoin has seen such a streak of consecutive positive adjustments. Following the mid-2021 mining ban in China, which cut the network’s hashrate by nearly 50%, difficulty experienced nine consecutive positive adjustments between July and November. The last adjustment in that streak coincided with bitcoin’s then-record high of $69,000, marking the peak of the bull market before the subsequent bear market in 2022.

A similar pattern was observed during the 2017 bull run, with 17 consecutive positive adjustments as bitcoin reached $20,000. However, the trend reversed in late 2018 as multiple negative adjustments accompanied a market bottom near $3,000.

While consecutive positive adjustments don’t definitively signal market tops or bottoms, they often align with critical inflection points in Bitcoin’s price cycles. Currently, the network’s strength is evident, with a 7-day moving average hashrate at 775 EH/s. Projections from CoinDesk research suggest that the network could surpass 1 zettahash per second before the next halving, indicating continued growth and resilience.