Bitcoin miners appear even more bullish on the cryptocurrency entering the final quarter of the year, with difficulty on pace to grow 60% in Q3 2019. 

Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Q3 2019

According to analyst Kevin Rooke, bitcoin mining difficulty has been growing on average 42% per quarter over the last three years. However, the current quarter is shaping up to be an anomaly. Rooke projects that BTC’s hash rate will be up more than 60% by the end of Q3 2019.

Mining difficulty has historically been used as an indication of the amount of computing resources being put towards securing bitcoin’s network. In addition to facilitating transactions on the blockchain, the hashrate also provides a glimpse at the competition between miners to receive block rewards in the form of newly minted BTC. It can also be used as a proxy for the network’s growth and decentralization.

As the difficulty increases, so does the competition for BTC, which has led some analysts to use hashrate as a bullish indicator. Miners are forced to commit more resources to the network, which drives up the price at which they are willing to sell newly minted BTC, as opposed to dumping it into the market. 

In August, bitcoin bull Max Keiser predicted that the meteoric rise in network difficulty would lead to an increase in BTC’s price. More recently, crypto analyst PlanB calculated BTC’s price reaching $31K by 2021 based upon mining difficulty. 

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