- On 7 January, Bitcoin’s hashrate was reported to be 290 EH/s.
- The data also reveals that the price of producing Bitcoin has decreased.
This first week of 2023 has been particularly intense for Bitcoin’s computing power, as it set a new milestone and ushered in the year by shattering its previous high point. On 7 January, Bitcoin’s hashrate was reported to be 290 EH/s, having already reached an ATH the day before.
ATH happened on January 6 at 15:42 UTC, at block height 770,709, when the network’s hashrate hit 361.20 EH/s. This new benchmark is equal to around 361.2 quintillion hashes per second, or 0.3611999 ZH/s.
With a block height of 762,845, the record set on January 6 was about 4% higher than the previous record set on November 12, 2022, which was roughly 347.16 EH/s. The increased hashrate has resulted in much shorter block production periods than the typical 10 minutes.
The Network Difficulty is Expected to Increase
According to the data, the average duration between blocks (the time between mined blocks) is now between 8:51 and 7:31 minutes. The data also reveals that the price of producing Bitcoin has decreased. In contrast to the current price of $16,920, the cost of producing a bitcoin is just $16,568 per unit, according to data from macromicro.me.
The average cost of producing a bitcoin is estimated at roughly $13.6K according to statistics on theminermag.com, suggesting that the actual cost may be substantially lower. Due to the shorter block intervals, the network difficulty is expected to increase on or around January 16, 2023, after a drop of 3.59% on January 2.
As of right now, predictions for the difficulty shift in more than eight days vary from a 7.04% rise to a 13.2% jump, which would be a new all-time high. The 13.55% gain on October 10, 2022, was the highest one-day percentage increase in that time period.
