Bitcoin hashrate hits record high despite difficulty peaking

Currently, Bitcoin miners receive a reward of 6.25 BTC for each block discovered. After the halving, the block reward amount will decrease to 3.125 BTC. These changes are of great importance for miners who ensure the security of the network, as their income will drop by 50%.

Meanwhile, according to the seven-day moving average, on October 8, 2023, Bitcoin hashrate reached a record peak. The network's computing power soared to 440 EH/s, even as the difficulty increased to a record 57.32 trillion.

7-day moving average of network hashrate as of October 10, 2023.

I wonder why different sites show different halving dates? This is because the interval between blocks drops below the average of ten minutes from time to time, which has already resulted in an increase in difficulty twice.

Additionally, the last block interval was 8 minutes and 2 seconds, and mining difficulty is projected to increase by 3.71% to 5.8% by October 16, 2023.

Now miners are facing a drop in daily income - currently just above $61 per petahash. One of the contributing factors is the falling prices in the BTC spot market.

In addition, this dynamics is largely caused by a drop in the daily number of so-called “inscriptions”, which reduced the income of miners from the Ordinals protocol. On the other hand, miners successfully tackled a previously overloaded mempool containing over 500,000 unconfirmed transactions.