An interesting change is taking place in the Bitcoin mining ecosystem right now. Ever since the halving occurred, there has been a question as to whether or not the number of miners would start to diminish. While it is still early to tell, there has been a drop in hashrate all of a sudden. For now, it remains unknown what causes this shift, but if the trend continues, there will be a mining difficulty decrease on the horizon.
It is not uncommon for the Bitcoin mining hashrate to show a decline now and then. Once could argue the mining power on the network has been declining since the beginning of July 2016, albeit the differences were rather minimal. This sudden drop, however, has taken things down by quite a notch.
Looking over the charts of the Bitcoin mining pools themselves, there does not seem to be anything out of the ordinary right now. Disqus Fish, Antminer, BTCC, and BW are still representing the vast majority of Bitcoin mining activity. The number of blocks found today is not higher or lower than it should be either.
It is possible the Bitcoin halving has forced some miners to shut down their operations. Then again, mining at home has been on the decline for quite some time now, so this is not entirely surprising. However, it remains a mystery as to where this sudden decrease in hash power is coming from.
At the same time, this is positive news for those miners who are still active on the Bitcoin network right now. A reduction of miners will lead to a mining difficulty decreases, and BitcoinWisdom projects a -5% adjustment in roughly 1,100 blocks from now. Until that time, there may be a slight delay in getting transactions confirmed, as blocks might take a bit longer to solve than the average of ten minutes.
At the time of publication, there was still over 1,382,3840,000 GH/s of mining power pointed at the Bitcoin network, which is a boatload of computational power. The Bitcoin halving will have made some older devices unprofitable beyond a point of recovery. Adjustments like these were to be expected, and there is no reason to panic just yet.
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