Déjà Vu? Last year China’s big crypto crackdown forced the Bitcoin miners to shut shop in the country. China was home to the biggest crypto miners in the world. Following this, the mining difficulty and the hashrate of the world’s largest cryptocurrency witnessed a massive plummet. While these miners looked for other places to call home, the hash rate recovered and skyrocketed over the last couple of weeks. Just yesterday, these metrics peaked and earlier today the mining difficulty witnessed a massive fall of 4 percent.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty surged to a high of 31.25 T, yesterday. The community was visibly surprised that miners were still mining the largest cryptocurrency despite its inert price. However, this notion was changed as the difficulty level dropped by 4.33 percent to 29.90 T within 24-hours.
The mining difficulty is usually a measurement of the complexity of solving a cryptographic puzzle. The difficulty rate surges with an increase in new mining units. The decrease occurs when miners unplug their machines. For instance, back in July 2021, Bitcoin’s difficulty level had dropped to a low of 13 T. This was when China ousted miners from the country.
While there isn’t any major country bringing mining rigs down, the community speculated that the miners were taking a break due to BTC’s stagnant price. At press time, Bitcoin had plummeted to a low of $29k and was still depleting by 2.68 percent. In addition to this, miners would be attaining comparatively lesser rewards in terms of value. The drop in the difficulty could also imply that miners may be giving up on the king coin or awaiting a potential surge.
Here’s what Bitcoin mining is doing to reduce global warming
According to a recent report published by Daniel Batten, the CEO of Geneious, Bitcoin mining could be the only way of minimizing methane emissions. The report further reveals,
“Using BTC mining to combust leaking methane can eliminate 5.32% of all global CO2-eq emissions. [..] Bitcoin mining is currently the only way of reducing these methane emissions which is both technologically feasible and does not require significant behavior change in order to work.”
The reduction of methane emissions is reportedly the quickest means to decrease global warming. This procedure even complements CO2 reduction strategies.