In a few days, on or around December 5, 2022, bitcoin miners could get a respite because the next difficulty retarget is anticipated to see a sizable drop. Significant Reduction in Mining Difficulty for Bitcoin is anticipated.

The estimated range for the subsequent difficulty retarget is between 6.13% and 10% lower. The difficulty change now appears to be on pace to surpass the 5.01% fall seen on July 21 and become the biggest decline of 2022.

Next Difficulty Retarget for Bitcoin Is Expected to Decline

The last time Bitcoin’s difficulty changed was on November 20, 2022, at block height 764,064, and it only went up by 0.51% on that day. The network’s difficulty did, however, increase to its all-time high of 36.95 trillion as a result of the increase. Since then, the network’s average hashrate over the past week has been roughly 249.1 exahashes per second (EH/s).

the network’s average hashrate has been around 249.1 exahash per second (EH/s).

The average Bitcoin network block time has been slower than usual as well, running between 10.2 minutes to 11.06 minutes on Monday evening (ET). The block intervals have been a lot higher since the difficulty change on Nov. 20, as prior to that day, block times had been on average less than ten minutes since Sept. 29.

The longer block times suggest the 2,016 blocks mined prior to the next retarget will be slower than the average of two weeks. At the time of writing, statistics indicate that the retarget could drop as low as 10% on Dec. 5, and metrics from Btc.com indicate the drop is estimated to be around 6.13%.

Both projections would surpass the highest difficulty contraction the Bitcoin network has witnessed all year, which was about -5.01% and was recorded on July 21 as the day with the worst drop. The present difficulty for miners is the greatest ever seen, while the price of bitcoin (BTC) is 76% lower than the record high ($69K) set on November 10, 2021.

Braiins.com and macromicro.me mining insights reveal that BTC’s cost of production ($18,360) is more than the current spot market value ($16,250). Additionally, Glassnode’s market information shows that bitcoin miners are accessing their treasuries.

The bitcoin mining business is “under great financial hardship,” according to a tweet from the onchain analytics company Glassnode, which also announced a mining study it co-published with Cryptoslate.

What we discover is that [bitcoin] miners are distributing about 135% of the coins that are mined, according to Glassnode. This indicates that miners are withdrawing funds from their 78K strong bitcoin treasuries. Publicly traded mining companies have revealed that they have been selling BTC in the second half of the year to increase cash on hand and reduce debt.

At the time of writing at 7:30 p.m. (ET), Foundry USA’s three-day hashrate is around 60.66 EH/s, which represents 25.45% of the global hashrate. In three days, the largest mining pool Foundry mined 98 BTC blocks out of 385 discovered by all the miners.

Foundry’s hashrate is followed by Antpool, F2pool, Binance Pool, and Viabtc respectively. Between all five pools over the last three days, the top five mining pools were able to discover 315 blocks out of the 385 total.