Bitcoin mining difficulty hits new high

Bitcoin mining difficulty hit another all-time high on Wednesday, up 5.56% from the last adjustment two weeks ago.

The mining difficulty level is now at 29.79 trillion at a block height of 733,824 after falling 1.26% on April 14 from the previous all-time high of 28.59 trillion on March 31, according to data from BTC.com.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measure of how hard a miner would have to work to verify transactions in a block on the blockchain or “mine” bitcoins. The difficulty level is adjusted every 2016 blocks, which usually takes about two weeks.

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Such mining difficulty adjustments are closely related to changes in mining hashrate, which refers to the level of processing power used per second while mining. As hashrate increases, mining difficulty usually follows.

The bitcoin hash rate rose to 220.49 exahashes per second on Wednesday for a seven-day average, up 9% since April 14, data from Blockchain.com shows.

A recent survey by the Bitcoin Mining Council found that the industry had a robust electricity balance of 58.4% between January and March of this year, up from 36.8% a year earlier.