Bitcoin's Difficulty Level Takes a Roller Coaster Ride
Author: Noah DavisThe coming difficulty adjustment is set for May 18, 2023 and it is around 2,000 blocks away. This decrease has granted miners with short-lived relief tracking the current block times which are above the usual ten-minute average. The most recent block time was ten minutes and forty-nine seconds. In addition, Bitcoin's mempool has an overwhelming unconfirmed transaction rate of over 200,000, with users paying high-priority and medium-priority fees of 5.05 and 4.61, respectively, to help get them processed.
As for the mining pools, Foundry USA is at the peak with 96.62 EH/s of mining power, which makes up 27.17% of Bitcoin’s hashrate. The other four major mining pools are Antpool (80.38 EH/s), F2pool (48.72 EH/s), Binance Pool (38.16 EH/s), and Viabtc (27.61 EH/s).
The difficulty level of Bitcoin has taken a roller coaster ride in the past few months and it did provide a much-needed relief to the miners. It is yet to be seen though whether the future holds more drops or increases in the commencing months. For now, miners can have enough time to evaluate their investments.