Bitcoin mining difficulty paints new ATH amid centralization fears

The rising network difficulty and the need to pay for energy are pushing out smaller players and even publicly traded corporations.

The Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty, a metric that tracks the relative challenge of adding new blocks to the ledger, climbed to a new all-time high of 142.3 trillion on Friday.

Mining difficulty hit successive all-time highs in August and September, driven by an influx of freshly deployed computing power over the last several weeks.

Bitcoin’s hashrate, the average of the total computing power securing the decentralized monetary protocol, also hit an all-time high of over 1.1 trillion hashes per second on Friday, according to CryptoQuant.

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