The difficulty of mining a bitcoin block dropped by 7.32% today, as miners turned off machines as a brutal bear market ate into profits. According to data from mining pool BTC.com, the adjustment at block height 766,080 is the largest downward change since July 2021. Following China’s ban on the industry, hordes of miners dropped off the network at that time. The country was the world’s largest bitcoin mining hub at the time. To keep the time it takes to mine a bitcoin block roughly stable, the mining difficulty automatically adjusts based on the hashrate, or computing power, that is online: The more miners there are, the more difficult it becomes.
