Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Drops for the First Time Since September: What's Happening to Profitability
Date: 2025-01-28 Author: Oliver Abernathy Categories: CRYPTO PAYMENTS
The decrease in difficulty means that miners now need to calculate about 108 trillion hash functions to successfully mine one block on the network and receive a reward of 3.125 BTC.
The changes in mining difficulty occur automatically to maintain a stable release schedule for new coins. Over the past two weeks, the difficulty was at an all-time high of about 110 trillion, where it has gradually increased since September 2024.
The network hashrate, which reflects the total computing power of all devices, also indicates a decrease in miner activity. According to CloverPool, the average daily hash rate on January 27 was 825 Eh/s (exahash per second), while two weeks ago this figure reached 850 Eh/s.
The Bitcoin rate continued to decline in the morning hours of January 27. This led to a drop in mining profitability: the Bitcoin Hashprice index, which shows the profitability from 1 PH/s (petahash per second), fell from $60 to $58 by 06:00 Moscow time.
After the mining difficulty decreased in the morning, the Bitcoin Hashprice index briefly rose to $59, but soon began to fall again following the Bitcoin rate. By 13:30 Moscow time, the index was $58.18, while BTC was trading around $99 thousand.
In December, when the Bitcoin price reached $108 thousand, the mining profitability according to the Bitcoin Hashprice index reached $65 per petahash. During the BTC peak above $109,000 in January, the index reached $62.
Despite the current figures, mining profitability is significantly lower than the previous bull market. For example, in March 2021, the Bitcoin Hashprice Index rose to $405 with a mining difficulty of only 23.5 trillion.
According to Jeffries investment bank, US public companies controlled about 25% of the Bitcoin network hashrate in December. The leader in this area is MARA, whose hashrate was 53.2 Eh/s.
