The difficulty of mining Bitcoin has been on a steady rise for some time now as more and more miners compete with each other to be the one to successfully mine the next block on the Bitcoin blockchain.
As the weather clears up in Texas, the world’s Bitcoin mining stronghold, miners are coming back online to double their activity. This time, this has taken the mining hash rate to a new all-time high.
Hash rate reaches all-time high
Over the weekend, the mining hash rate hit a new all-time high. According to information of Hashrate Index supported by facts from Ycharts, Bitcoin hash rate spiked from 406 EH/s on the previous day to 465 EH/s on Saturday.
Specifically, the 7-day average hash rate reached 401 EH/s on Saturday, while the 3-day average is up a whopping 18% to 448 EH/s. Although the hash rate has now dropped to 425 EH/s at the time of writing, it is still at the highest level and more than 119.1% higher than a year ago.
The increase in hash rate has naturally led to an increase in block production rate. For the past few months, BTC miners had been targeting a block production rate of 6 per hour, now a block is being produced with an average time of 9 minutes and 15 seconds.
BTC price recovers above $30,600 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com
Bitcoin Mining Revenue Reaches $184 Million in Q2
Bitcoin has seen a surge in transaction volumes this year as the cryptocurrency continues to dominate the industry. In the past 24 hours alone, the total volume of bitcoin traded has increased by 30.37%.
According to a report By published by Coin Metrics on July 5, BTC miners generated a remarkable revenue of $2.4 billion in the second quarter of 2023. Of this amount, $184 million came from transaction fees alone, representing more than the previous five quarters combined.
This increase in transaction fee revenue can be traced back to the increase in transaction volume after BRC-20 tokens were introduced on the Bitcoin blockchain. The BRC-20 came in as a token standard to enable the creation and transfer of fungible tokens on the blockchain through the use of ordinal inscriptions.
Bitcoin miners also experienced favorable macroeconomic conditions in the past quarter, including lower electricity rates for miners in the United States. On the other hand, Bitcoin mining has grown in the Middle East, with the UAE leading the way. Miners in the UAE are now producing around 13 EH/s, accounting for almost 4% of the total hash rate.
As for Bitcoin, the price of the cryptocurrency has hovered around $30,000 since the end of June.
Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView.com