This week, Bitcoin had recorded its lowest hashrate of about 170 exahash per second (EH/s), but it has now climbed once more to 300 EH/s.
This was after a number of bitcoin mining operations had been shut down on December 25th, 2022. On December 29th, statistics recording the three-day hashhrate showed that 50% of the global hashrate was contributed by 2 mining pools alone.
Hashrate ramps up
On December 28th, 2022, the computational processing power for mining bitcoin climbed up to 300 EH/s.
Three days earlier, the global bitcoin hashrate had come down to a low of 170 EH/s because bitcoin miners based in Texas had decided to shut down their mining equipment to relieve excess load on the grid.
However, reports indicated that most of the hashpower had returned on December 25th and had reached 240 EH/s.
After it recorded a rise on Wednesday to 300 EH/s, statistics on Thursday showed that the total network hashrate was somewhere close to 250 EH/s.
Apart from that, the last three days also showed that 50% of the total hashrate of the bitcoin network has been contributed by two mining pools.
The statistics
Obviously, this has resulted in criticism of the network and has also given rise to talk of centralization. 31.45% of the total global hashrate on December 29th was captured by Foundry USA.
Meanwhile, 21.87% of the total hashrate was commanded by Antpool on the same day. This means that both Foundry USA and Antpool command about 53.32% of the total hashrate of the bitcoin network.
The third contributor is F2pool, which has a share of 14.25% and a 9.34% contribution is also made by Viabtc.
This means that the top three pools i.e. Foundry USA, Antpool and F2pool have captured about 67.57% of the total hashrate of the BTC network.
The four mining pools, including Viabtc, command about 76.91% of the total hashrate and these statistics are for the last three days.
It should be noted that there are just 12 mining pools that have dedicated their computational hashpower to the bitcoin network.
Unknown miners contribute about 2.46%, or 5.64 EH/s hashrate of the global network.
Difficulty change
On December 19th, 2022, the mining difficulty of the bitcoin network changed and recorded a 3.27% increase at block height of 768,096.
The next change in the mining difficulty of the bitcoin network is scheduled for January 3rd, 2023 and current estimates indicate that the difficulty could be lower by 7.39% to 8.1% as opposed to what it is today.
On some occasions, the block generation times have proven to be faster than the average of 10 minutes, as they have reached as low as 9:33 minutes.
However, most of the block generation times have remained above the average and mostly around 10:54 minutes.
The Bitmain Antminer S19 XP Hyd is the most profitable bitcoin mining machine at press time because it is capable of generating hashpower of about 255 terahash per second (TH/s).