BTC blocks

Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Rises for the First Time in 57 Days, BTC Hashrate Slipped 1.7% Lower in Q2

04/08/2022 by Idelto Editor

The mining difficulty tied to the Bitcoin network increased for the first time in 57 days, rising 1.74% higher than the last two weeks. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s hashrate has been below average as the network’s computational power is down 1.7% lower in the second quarter than in Q1 2022. After reaching 292 exahash per second (EH/s) on June 8, Bitcoin’s hashrate today is coasting along below the 200 EH/s mark at 182 EH/s.

Bitcoin’s Difficulty Increases, Making It More Difficult to Discover Block Rewards for the Next 2 Weeks

Following the three consecutive difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) reductions over the last six weeks, the DAA has shifted upwards for the first time since June 8. On August 4, at block height 747,936, the difficulty increased by 1.74%, bringing the metric up from 27.69 trillion to the current 28.20 trillion.

The DAA, or difficulty epoch, changes every 2,016 blocks or roughly every two weeks. The DAA increases when the 2,016 blocks are discovered too fast and the metric decreases when the discovery time is too slow. Satoshi Nakamoto’s design makes it so roughly every ten minutes, a new BTC block is found as the DAA system is modeled by a Poisson distribution scheme.

Since the 1.74% increase on Thursday, it is now harder to find a bitcoin block than it was during the last two weeks. Prior to the rise, the DAA shifted downwards three times in a row after June 8. Currently, the network’s 28.20 trillion difficulty metric is 9.76% lower than the all-time high in mid-May when it tapped 31.25 million.

With lower BTC prices and the latest difficulty increase, the changes could affect miners negatively during the next two weeks. At press time, the network’s computational power is under the 200 EH/s zone, as it’s coasting along at 182 EH/s today.

The overall Bitcoin hashrate slipped 1.7% lower in Q2 2022 compared to the first quarter, according to statistics compiled by stockapps.com’s fintech expert Edith Muthoni. “In the second half of the second quarter, Bitcoin’s overall hash rate grew more irregular and variable,” Muthoni notes in her research. “This behavior indicates miners are struggling to adapt to the changing market conditions.”

At 182 EH/s, Bitcoin’s hashrate is 37% lower than the 292 EH/s all-time high posted on June 8. Second quarter data indicates that Foundry USA was the top mining pool, capturing 22.27% of Q2’s overall hashrate. Foundry discovered 2,843 BTC blocks out of the 12,766 blocks found in Q2.

Antpool followed Foundry with 14.77% of the global hashrate as the pool discovered 1,885 blocks during the three-month period. The third largest mining pool in Q2 2022 was F2pool, with 14.31% of the global hashrate, as it mined 1,827 out of the 12,766 blocks discovered in the second quarter.

What do you think about Bitcoin’s difficulty rising 1.74% higher? Let us know your thoughts about this subject in the comments section below.

Following BTC’s Price Drop, Bitcoin Miners Benefit From a 2.35% Difficulty Reduction

22/06/2022 by Idelto Editor

During the past week, Bitcoin’s hashrate has dropped a few percentages after reaching 288 exahash per second (EH/s) on June 8, 2022. Bitcoin miners, however, got a break on Wednesday, June 22, as the mining difficulty dropped by 2.35% making it easier for miners to find blocks. The 2.35% drop brings the difficulty down to the 29.50 trillion range for the next two weeks.

Bitcoin’s Mining Difficulty Drops 2.35%

On Wednesday, June 22, at block height 741,888, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty decreased 2.35% lower than two weeks ago. At that time, the difficulty rating was 30.28 trillion and today it is 29.50 trillion. Furthermore, bitcoin’s fiat value dropped to a low of $17,593 on June 18.
Essentially, Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) shifts every 2016 blocks and the changes are based on the amount of time it took to find the previous 2016 block subsidies. The difficulty is meant to keep block times consistent at roughly 10 minutes in between each BTC block found.
The last difficulty change at block height 739,872, two weeks ago, increased by 1.29%. That means the previous 2016 blocks before block height 739,872 took less than two weeks to find, which means miners were faster during the period. This means while the DAA shift dropped by 2.35% today, the previous 2016 blocks were found at a much slower rate.
A 2.35% reduction makes it 2.35% easier to find BTC blocks than it was during the past two weeks or 2016 blocks found. BTC’s block reward halving is expected to occur on April 23, 2024, and is less than 100,000 blocks away.
While the hashrate tapped 288 EH/s on June 8, the network’s hashrate dipped during the crypto market rout and it hit a low of 164 EH/s on June 18. At the time of writing on Wednesday, June 22, the hashrate is coasting along at speeds just below 200 EH/s.
Over the last three days, the top five BTC mining pools include Foundry USA, F2pool, Antpool, Poolin, and Viabtc. The aforementioned five BTC mining pools command 72.8% of the global hashrate today.

During the last month, 4,271 BTC blocks were mined into existence and Foundry discovered 959 of those blocks. Antpool found 636, F2pool discovered 591, Poolin found 457, and Viabtc found 434 bitcoin (BTC) block rewards.
Over the next two weeks, it will be 2.35% easier to find BTC blocks than it was the two weeks before block height 741,888. With the price being lower, miners will benefit from the DAA reduction on Wednesday.

What do you think about Bitcoin’s difficulty reduction on Wednesday afternoon (ET)? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

13,233 Blocks Found by 16 Pools — A Look at the Top Bitcoin Mining Pools in Q1 2022

12/04/2022 by Idelto Editor

During the first quarter of 2022, Bitcoin’s hashrate averaged between 180 to 200 exahash per second (EH/s) and during the course of that time, 13,233 block rewards were found by 16 mining pools. According to three-month statistics, Foundry USA was the network’s top mining pool in terms of hashrate percentage, as the bitcoin mining operation scored 2,380 blocks in Q1 2022.

Foundry USA Commands Q1 2022’s Top Bitcoin Mining Pool Position

Metrics indicate bitcoin miners issued approximately 82,706.25 BTC over the last three months after collectively finding 13,233 block rewards. That bitcoin block data does not include the fees paid to miners during the first quarter of 2022.

During that timeframe, there were 16 known mining pools and one “unknown” source of hashrate dedicating computational power to the Bitcoin network. The top mining pool during the last three months was Foundry USA as the pool captured 17.99% of the global hashrate in Q1.

Out of 2,380 BTC blocks mined, Foundry USA mined one empty block in Q1. Following Foundry USA’s lead in Q1 was Antpool, as it captured 14.34% of the global hashrate in 90 days. Antpool managed to mine 1,898 bitcoin blocks but four of them were empty.

F2pool was the third-largest bitcoin pool, commanding 14.05% of the network’s overall hashrate in the last three months. The 14.05% of computational power gave F2pool 1,859 blocks out of the 13,233 block rewards found in Q1.

Behind the top three pools, records show Poolin had 12.06% of the global hashrate with 1,596 blocks found, and Binance Pool captured 11.33% of the hashrate with 1,499 blocks found in Q1. The aforementioned five pools collectively captured 57.71% of Bitcoin’s global hashrate.

While there were 16 known mining pools, an “unknown” source of hashrate sometimes called “stealth miners” scored 158 bitcoin blocks, or 1.19% of the overall hashrate. While 2021 was a prominent year for stealth miners, the first quarter of 2022 shows unknown hashrate is much lower this year.

Mining Difficulty Jumped Close to 17% Higher This Year, Unknown Hash Is Still the Most Dominant With 225,778 Blocks Mined Since 2009

During 2022’s first three months, the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) saw five increases and just two reductions. Out of the seven epoch changes, the network’s mining difficulty increased 16.98% higher than prior to the first week of January.

On January 8, 2022, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty was 24.37 trillion and today, the difficulty is 28.59 trillion. The largest DAA increase took place at block height 719,712 on January 20, when the DAA shifted upwards by 9.32%. The largest DAA reduction took place during the first week of March at block height 725,760 when it dropped by 1.49%.

While Foundry USA was the top mining pool in 2022 over the last three months, in terms of lifetime statistics, the pool only represents 0.9% of the hashrate since 2009. The largest entity in terms of lifetime hashrate since 2009, is the unknown hashrate, as it captured 30.9% of the hashrate.

The unknown hash is followed by F2pool, Antpool, Btc.com, and Slush Pool, respectively. The now-defunct mining pool BTC Guild still holds the sixth-largest quantity of hashrate since 2009 with 4.5% or 32,935 blocks mined. For some comparison, Foundry USA has only found 6,300 blocks during the pool’s lifetime mining.

What do you think about the first quarter’s top bitcoin mining pools? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

23,250 ‘Sleeping Bitcoins’ Spent in 2021: This Year Old School Miners Moved $1 Billion in BTC From 2010-2013

28/09/2021 by Idelto Editor

On Bitcoin’s 12th anniversary, a mystery miner from the early days spent 1,000 decade-old bitcoins that were mined in 2010. The strange miner was not the only entity that spent 2010 BTC block rewards during the last nine months, but this miner returned on a few occasions to spend strings of ten-year-old block rewards. As the end of 2021 nears, 152 blocks with 7,600 bitcoin worth $319 million today and minted in 2010 have been spent this year after sitting idle for over a decade.

**Editor’s note: This article was updated at 12:40 p.m. (EST) on Sept. 28, 2021, to include commentary from the creator of the blockchain parser, in order to explain the parser’s definition so-called ‘sleeping bitcoins.’

Old School Whale Transfers From 2010 Outpace 2011 and 2012 Spends, $977 Million Worth of Sleeping Bitcoins Moved This Year

During the last 12 years bitcoins have been lost by a great number of people under different circumstances, and it’s likely these coins will never return to circulation. Then there’s another group of bitcoins the community calls ‘sleeping bitcoins’ or ‘zombie bitcoins’ because they have been sitting idle since the day they were created.

At some point, if the owner decides to spend the bitcoin, the ‘sleeping bitcoins’ wake from slumber after a number of years. Last year and this year, Bitcoin.com News has been monitoring old school block rewards that get spent years later, after discovering an extraordinary 2010 whale.

Following the spend on the 12th anniversary of Bitcoin (January 3, 2021), the mystery miner appeared a few times during the year to spend strings of 20 block rewards from 2010. Block spends from 2010 are not common, and each block reward contains 50 BTC as the first block reward halving did not happen until November 28, 2012.

The last time this specific miner from 2010 appeared was on June 9, 2021. This year they spent 20 block reward strings on January 3, 2021 (Bitcoin’s 12th anniversary), January 10, 2021, January 25, 2021, February 28, 2021, March 23, 2021, and June 9, 2021.

That’s a total of 120 blocks, or 6,000 bitcoin, worth $252 million spent by what we assume is a single mining entity from 2010. In fact, we can say that the entity spent 78.94% of all the 2010 blocks spent this year (152 total). Because of this whale’s spends, the 2010 block reward spends in 2021 outpaced 2011 and 2012 block reward spends.

In 2021, there were approximately 85 block rewards from 2011 transferred from the original address. That’s 4,250 bitcoins total worth $178 million using today’s exchange rates. January and February 2021 saw the most 2011 blocks transferred this year.

Statistics from btcparser.com show that there were more 2011 blocks spent this year than the quantity of 2012 blocks. The aggregate total of 2012 block rewards moved in 2021 is currently 63 block rewards. Of the block rewards in the list of 2012 blocks, all of them were pre-halving minted which means they were issued before November 28, 2012.

63 block rewards with 50 BTC each is approximately 3,150 BTC or $132 million dollars’ worth at the time of writing. The number of 2013 blocks transferred in 2021 exceeded all of the 2010, 2011, and 2012 block reward spends this year.

2013 Block Spends Surpass Previous Three Years but the Transfers Moved Fewer Bitcoin

So far there have been 330 block rewards from 2013 spent during the course of 2021. That’s 30 more blocks than the 2010, 2011, and 2012 spends combined. However, because the 2013 blocks were spent after the first halving in November 2012, the transfers only moved 8,250 BTC this year ($347M).

That’s because miners in 2013 got 25 BTC instead of the 50 BTC reward that was given prior to the halving. All of the 2010, 2011, and 2012 spends combined (300 blocks) adds up to 15,000 BTC ($630M). Between block rewards moved from 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013, an aggregate total of 630 block rewards was spent with 23,259 BTC worth $977 million today.

Crypto proponents have no idea who these miners are but they certainly mined a great quantity of bitcoin in the early days. It’s worth noting that the terms “spent” or “spend” in this article, do not necessarily mean that the bitcoins were “sold” to a third party for fiat or another crypto asset.

For this article, using Btcparser.com we parsed 21,519 addresses from 2009, 12,396 addresses from 2010, 3,598 addresses from 2011, 2,193 addresses from 2012, and 5,214 addresses from 2013. From a visual perspective, in this report we leveraged “The (Not) ‘Satoshi’s Bags’ Tracker” located on theholyroger.com. No block rewards from 2009 were spent in 2021 and the last time a 2009 block was moved was on May 20, 2020, when an entity spent a coinbase reward that was minted on February 9, 2009.

Speaking with the creator of Btcparser.com, he said that it was worth mentioning that sleeping wallets are not all alike. “For instance,” he said. “Whalealert thinks that every wallet that hasn’t made any outgoing transaction for the last few years is a sleeping one. In my opinion, those are not truly sleeping ones. Btcparser monitors only wallets that have never made any outgoing transfer. Thus we don’t know whenever someone has access to those bitcoins (knows the private key), so we call them virgins.” The blockchain parser’s creator added:

Every time the wallet loses its virginity, Btcparser removes it from the monitoring lists. So it might be that some wallets had 50 BTC, but moved only one. Our parser sends messages about that, it shows how much has been transferred, how much remained on balance and that’s it, this wallet won’t be monitored in the future.

What do you think about the $977 million in bitcoin moved from 2010-2013 block rewards in 2021? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.

Bitcoin Network’s Mining Difficulty Expected to See Largest Increase in Over 2 Months

10/08/2021 by Idelto Editor

Bitcoin’s hashrate has been steadily climbing after dropping to 69 exahash per second (EH/s) on June 28, as it reached a high of 117 EH/s on Tuesday morning (EDT). The rise in hashpower will likely lead to the highest difficulty expansion in 89 days as estimates currently show a 7.39% increase is due in two days.

Bitcoin Block Rewards Expected to Be More Than 7% Harder to Find in 2 Days

In a touch more than two days’ time, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is expected to jump over 7.3% as the crypto asset’s overall hashrate has improved a great deal. Since June 28, Bitcoin’s hashrate has jumped 69.56% and has been rising higher following the lift in market prices.

Bitcoin Network's Mining Difficulty Expected to See Largest Increase in Over 2 Months — Bitcoin hashrate over a 1-year zoom on August 10, 2021.

On July 15, Bitcoin’s hashrate hit a high of 130 EH/s holding just below that zone for the last 25 days, and once in a while, it has tried to surpass the metric. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty makes it more difficult for miners to find blocks and during the last epoch, it increased more than 6%. However, the largest increase since then was on May 13, 2021, when the difficulty increased by 21.53% that day.

The next difficulty change shows an estimate of around 7.39% and could increase higher if the hashrate continues to climb. This means that over the last month, the difficulty will be close to 13.39% higher in two days. At the time of writing, BTC’s mining difficulty is around 14.50 trillion, and it is expected to be around 15.57 trillion after the next difficulty change.

Besides the May 13 change, the difficulty adjustment will be the highest change since January 9, 2021. While the difficulty makes it harder to find BTC blocks, it can increase and decrease depending on how much hashrate is dedicated to the blockchain.

Antpool Still Commands the Top Spot, Bitcoin’s Inflation Rate Per Annum Is 1.76%, Bitcoin Halving Is 1,006 Days Away

On Monday, Antpool is the largest BTC miner, capturing 17.71% of the overall hashrate. Antpool has over 20 EH/s dedicated to the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain and is followed by Poolin’s 15.12 EH/s of hashpower. With more than 15 exahash Poolin has over 13% of the network hashpower today while Viabtc commands the third position.

Viabtc’s 11.46% of the network hashrate derives from the 12.9 EH/s of hashpower it is applying to the chain. The fourth position is held by F2pool (10.83%), and the fifth-largest miner is Foundry USA (9.79%). Unknown hash or stealth miners still have a large quantity of global hashpower with 9.17% of the hashpower today or 10.9 EH/s.

As of August 10, 2021, there are approximately 1,006 days until the next block reward halving and it’s likely miners will try to mine with as much hashpower as they can until then. When that happens, the 6.25 BTC block reward will shrink to 3.125 coins per block post halving.

Give or take hashrate speed, there are roughly 144 blocks found every day and the BTC inflation rate per annum is only 1.76%. At the time of writing, the next difficulty retarget will be 386 BTC blocks away and at the current velocity of the network and market prices, it seems miners are in for a run of consecutive difficulty increases.

What do you think about the upcoming difficulty increase and the fact that Bitcoin’s hashrate has been recouping from the losses at the end of June? Let us know what you think about this subject in the comments section below.