Bitcoin Miners Set to See a New Difficulty High as 'Tectonic Shifts' Bring 'New Opportunities'

cryptonews.com:

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty seems likely to break another record in a matter of hours, yet again cutting into the decreasing profit margins of miners. 

At 14:47 UTC, it is estimated that the Bitcoin mining difficulty, or the measure of how hard it is to compete for mining rewards, will rise some 4.19% in less than a day, per data by mining pool BTC.com.

With this, the difficulty would hit a new all-time high (ATH) of 28.6 T, compared to the previous ATH of 27.97 T seen in mid-February. 

Though the percentage is far from being the highest this year, it is sufficient to lead to the new high as this rise in difficulty will follow two consecutive and relatively small drops that had pushed the difficulty a bit lower from the previous ATH.

However, hashrate, or the computational power of the network, has seen a minor decrease since the previous difficulty adjustment two weeks ago. Between then and March 29, the 7-day moving average hashrate is almost unchanged, per BitInfoCharts.com data.

In the same time period, Bitcoin mining profitability went up just over 14%, as the price of BTC was rising as well, going from USD 40,922 on March 17 to USD 47,885 on March 29.

The mining difficulty of Bitcoin is adjusted around every two weeks (or more precisely, every 2016 blocks) to maintain the normal 10-minute block time. The 7-day moving average block time on March 29 was 9.54 minutes.

According to ByteTree data, in the past week, miners have held more of their newly generated BTC, compared to what they’ve spent, while in the weeks prior, it was the opposite.

At 14:50 UTC, BTC was trading at USD 47,151. It was down 1% in a day and up 11% in a week.

Meanwhile, the latest analytics firm Coin Metrics’ report noted that mining is “an