Data from Glassnode reveals that the BTC blockchain faces the largest decline since its creation. The mining difficulty of the coin went down by around 28% at block 689,471 on July 2.
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#Bitcoin mining difficulty just saw its largest downward adjustment in history: -28%https://t.co/dREzQkzRBk pic.twitter.com/HO5DhzESY9
— glassnode (@glassnode) July 3, 2021
This decline was caused by China's mining crackdown and the drop in hashrate. In the BTC network, blocks are created every 10 minutes, that is 1 block in 10 minutes. The algorithm self-adjusts the difficulty rate every two weeks or 2.016 blocks. In terms of the latest interval, the hashrate indicator stood at 87.7 H/S. This shows the computational power used in a second.
The indicator reached its peak of around 180 H/S in May.
This slowed down Bitcoin's mean block time which now can take up to 23 minutes.The fall can be beneficial for operational miners as they can find blocks at a rate near to 10 min. target more easily. Another indicator, the number of BTC active addresses has also fallen. It hit the lowest mark of 758.000 since April 2020.
The second quarter of 2021 was the worst for BTC since 2018.
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Currently, it trades at above $34.400 gaining around 12% in the previous 7 days. The coin is still 46% down from its all-time high of $64.800 reached in April.