Bitcoin mining difficulty falls as electricity costs rise

As a result of the latest difficulty adjustment, Bitcoin mining difficulty fell by 0.35% to 27.45 T. The positive trend observed since November 2021 came to an end at the start of March.

In February, the difficulty reached an all-time high of 29.97 T. On March 3, the metric fell by 1.5% to 27.55 million (T).

Compass Mining CEO Whit Gibbs, in an interview CoinDesk, noted that the slowdown in momentum could be linked to rising electricity costs, which forced some miners to shut off equipment. He expects this process to continue in the near term.

Yaran Mellerud from Arcane Research also drew attention to the Kazakh government’s measures to combat illegal mining. According to his calculations, the negative effect on hashrate was around 1.5%. In part for this reason, the computational power (217.5 EH/s) remains below the record 248.1 EH/s achieved in February.

In 2021, hashrate began to fall in May amid power-supply problems for miners in Sichuan. The decline continued with the exit of industry players from China following the ban. The hashrate–adjusted difficulty also declined. Following one of the recalculations in July, the drop reached a record 27.94%.

Both indicators began to recover only closer to August. It was then that the United States for the first time led the Bitcoin hashrate share.

In February, revenues of Bitcoin miners fell by 13% compared with the previous month, barely topping $1 billion.

Earlier, Arcane Research analysts forecast a rise in the share of the American miners.

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