Bitcoin mining profitability fell by about one-fifth in November, and the difficulty of mining a BTC block dropped by 7.32% in early December.
Miners are shutting down their BTC mining devices as bearish trends in the crypto market reduce profitability. According to figures from Hashrate Index, mining profitability was down 20% in November this year.
This year’s drop in BTC quotations led to a significant decrease in mining profitability due to high electricity tariffs. Even large mining companies like Core Scientific (CORZ) and Argo Blockchain (ARBK) are facing a liquidity crisis due to the fall in BTC’s price. Along with that, the cloud mining provider Compute North filed for bankruptcy.
Data from the mining pool BTC.com shows that Bitcoin mining difficulty on December 6, 2022 at 01:50 (UTC) fell by 7.32%. That’s an all-time high since July 2021, when Bitcoin’s hashrate plummeted amid a crackdown on Chinese miners.
Figures reveal that computing power is distributed among twelve mining pools. The largest of these are:
- Foundry USA (32.69%);
- F2Pool (17.31%);
- AntPool (16.03%);
- Binance Pool (10.9%).
Therefore, the decrease in BTC mining difficulty and its hashrate doesn’t make the network more vulnerable to attacks.
Recall that analysts stated that BTC mining became more energy intensive in Q3 2022, and the amount of renewable energy sources used for that purpose dropped as well.
