Bitcoin’s hashrate – the computing power dedicated to mining the world’s biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalization – hit another record high as thousands of new miners came online in the last few months.
Data from bitcoin mining pool BTC.com showed another milestone level passed. At block height 594,720 , the average hashrate jumped to 85.08 exahashes per second (EH/s), smashing the previous record rate of 77.08 EH/s on September 1.
Mining Difficulty
As ever more powerful mining rigs come online and compete for bitcoin rewards, the hashrate increases as the network’s blockchain adjusts its mining difficulty to ensure the time to produce a single block remains the same – around 10 minutes.
On Friday September 13, the difficulty rate also hit a new record high of 11.89 trillion, up from the previous 10.77 trillion as measured on September 1.
Powerful new application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners have an average hash power of about 55 terahashes per second (TH/s). Given that 1 EH/s is equal to 1 million TH/s it can be estimated that since June 14, when the hashrate stood at 53.03, the extra 33 EH/s may be accounted to around 600,000 new ASICs added to the total bitcoin mining pool in those three months.
Just last week, two new Bitmain ASIC models hit the market only to be sold out instantly.
Featured Image Credit: Picture Courtesy of Bitmain
