BTC Mining Becomes More Competitive, Hash Rate Hits 207 EH/s

Bitcoin (BTC) touched an all-time high of more than $68,000 in November last year. The price of the world’s most valuable digital currency directly impacts its mining revenues. Amid BTC’s recent price correction, the mining revenues have dipped by over 50% since October 2021.

Declining revenue is not the only factor affecting the BTC mining ecosystem. Its network difficulty, which evaluates the competitiveness in the mining sector, reached a record high of 28.6 trillion in April.

Earlier this week, the BTC hash rate touched 207 EH/s, which is up by more than 140% compared to 85 EH/s in July 2021. With rising mining rate, declining revenues and price corrections, Bitcoin mining is becoming more competitive for leading players in the industry.

“Despite network transaction fees being near all-time lows in (BTC denominated terms), the competition in the mining industry continues to set new all-time highs. The protocol mining difficulty has now reached a new ATH, with each Bitcoin block requiring 122.78 Zettahashes to solve. This would be equivalent to all 7.938 billion people on earth each guessing a SHA256 hash 15.5 trillion times, every 10 mins to solve each Bitcoin block. Quite extraordinary,” Glassnode noted in its report.

Long-Term BTC Supply

Glassnode’s report shows that approximately 13.66% of the long-term BTC supply is at an unrealized loss. During the previous bear cycle, the number reached as high as 35%.

“Bitcoin Long-term holders (LTHs) currently hold 13.66% of the supply that is at an unrealized loss, which is a sum approximately equal in magnitude to the amount of sell-side they applied in the 2020-21 bull market. LTH coins are the least likely to be spent and sold on a statistical basis, and it can be seen in 2018 and March 2020 that they have held through much deeper losses in the past,” the report explained.