Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Rises 5.54% to 148.36 Trillion

Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty rose 5.54% to 148.364561 trillion Thursday, Oct. 29, increasing the computing work required to mine blocks as a modeled one-PH/s operation faced a power-cost shortfall.

The adjustment took effect at block 973,728 at 3:14:58 p.m. ET (19:14:58 UTC). It followed a 5.92% increase on Oct. 16, which brought difficulty to 140.577680 trillion. The latest increase was smaller than the 6.44% rise in an earlier projection for the adjustment. The Oct. 16 change was the previous adjustment.

A network-level hashprice estimate stood at $32.9757 per PH/s per day at 8 a.m. ET (12:00 UTC) Friday, Oct. 30. Hashprice estimates expected revenue from block subsidies and transaction fees for a given amount of computing power; it does not represent an individual miner’s realized payout.

For a hypothetical fleet running continuously at 25 joules per terahash and producing one PH/s, that workload would use 25 kilowatts, or 600 kilowatt-hours a day. Power at $0.06 per kilowatt-hour would cost $36 daily. After an assumed 2% pool fee, estimated revenue would be about $32.32, leaving a $3.68 daily shortfall before other expenses. In this model, the power-only breakeven rate is about 5.39 cents per kilowatt-hour. The calculation excludes costs such as hosting, cooling, maintenance and financing, and does not account for downtime.

Bitcoin adjusts difficulty every 2,016 blocks to keep block production near an average of 10 minutes. The subsidy at block 973,728 remained 3.125 BTC, with transaction fees added to the block reward. Higher difficulty means miners must complete more computational work to find blocks and compete for those rewards.