Bitcoin [BTC] mining difficulty increases by 4.25%; Ethereum [ETH] mining difficulty up by 20%

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has increased by approximately 4.25% while that of Ethereum’s increased by approximately 20% in a single day.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin mining difficulty is a way to prevent mining of too many BTCs too fast. So, as the number of miners increase, the mining difficulty increase as well. As per the data obtained from Bitcoinwisdom, the current difficulty of Bitcoin is at 6,061,518,831,027, the block generation time for one block is at 9.5 minutes.

The current hash rate for Bitcoin is at 43.795 million Gh/s [Gigahash per second]. The chart below shows the relationship between mining difficult and hash rate.

Bitcoinwisdom.com

Furthermore, the block halving for Bitcoin is in a year, i.e., on May 24, 2020, at 15:32:46. On that exact time, Bitcoin’s block rewards for all the miners would decrease from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.

Block halving for Bitcoin happens once every 210,000 blocks are mined on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Ethereum

Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency in the world by market cap [at the time of writing] has also seen a drastic increase in difficulty level in recent days.

Ethereum’s current difficulty [at the time of writing] was at 2,816,912,243,698,462. The chart below shows how ETH’s difficulty has varied over the 24-hour time frame.

CoinWarz.com

Ethereum’s difficulty has increased by over 20% in a matter of seven days. However, the difficulty of ETH has increased by approximately 20% from 10 – 11 February.

More recent effects of the increase in difficulty of Ethereum’s mining was seen during the launch of Ethereum’s update, Constantinople. One of the reasons why the Constantinople update was postponed was due to an excessive and abnormal increase in mining difficulty.

A Redditor, u/jps commented:

“difficulty bomb creates a different equilibrium point because it is now adding about 1/2500 every block, and the adjust is in units of 1/1024, so there is a meaningful increase in difficulty, which needs to be offset by a meaningful number of blocks getting solved >18 seconds.
This basically means that difficulty will increase until average block solve time is just over 20 seconds.”

Another Redditor, u/cuongnq commented:

“Diffbomb is set to increase every 100k block. So we just passed 7200000. Block time increase to 20 seconds too. If hard fork not work in 7280000 we will see one or more of this shit.”