Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped 5.7% on Thursday in the largest negative adjustment for nearly 18 months.
When there’s an increase in the number of miners, the difficulty of mining bitcoin rises. Conversely, if there is a decrease in the number of miners competing to find new blocks, the protocol lowers the mining difficulty, making it easier for the remaining miners to discover blocks.The negative difficulty adjustment follows a 10% drop in network hash rate since the last difficulty adjustment on April 24, from a seven-day moving average of 639.58 EH/s to 578.
However, today’s negative difficulty adjustment could help to ease some miners’ post-halving struggles, making it slightly easier to mine blocks than it has been for the past two weeks.Today’s negative Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment is the first since a 1% drop at the end of March and follows two positive adjustments surrounding the halving.
The initial post-halving difficulty adjustment increase — the first ever immediately following a halving event — was attributed to the hype surrounding Runes. Runes is a new fungible token standard for Bitcoin launched at the halving that initially helped to drive up transaction fee revenue for miners after the subsidy drop.