A recent plunge in bitcoin value has pushed numerous miners to turn off their equipment. However, new difficulty level makes mining more profitable.
On December 3 the new bitcoin mining difficulty level decreased by 15.13%, the most significant drop in seven years. In 2011 the figure at one point went down by 18%. The number is affected by network hash rate, the total computing power of mining equipment.
The sudden dive in cryptocurrency value in the last month and overall sluggish market performance this year have become a deciding factor for many miners to shut down their mining equipment to avoid further losses.
This week the profitability slightly nudged upward due to decrease in mining difficulty. The profitability is affected by two components – block reward and network difficulty. The first will change in May 2020, the second gets altered once every two weeks to maintain the normal 10-minute block time.
The news comes as a break for those who have placed heavy bets on the mining activity. Recently, a Chinese crypto outlet reported that mining operators started selling mining machines ‘by kilo’, rather than by unit, giving way to sundry memes on the internet.