Bitcoin hash rate live

Altcoin mining options were available for independent miners, while bitcoin mining could also be done in the cloud by purchasing cloud-based mining power on CEX. IO could buy shares of Ghash. IO mining hardware to operate on the Ghash. This is an innovative form of cloud mining which allows miners to enter and leave the bitcoin mining market quickly, without needing to purchase mining hardware.

Although most traders take advantage of these cloud mining features of Ghash. IO, actual mining hardware could also be redeemed through CEX. IO closed in , CEX. IO continued operating as a bitcoin exchange. Shares are hashes, smaller than the target with a difficulty of 1 usually pools use the same difficulty as the target for shares, but technically any difficulty could be used.

Every hash created has a 1 in possibility of being a valid share. In order to mine bitcoin in a more evenly-distributed and predictable way, miners often use pools; if this is the case, miners are awarded bitcoins according to the shares they submit. On April 8, , GHash. IO presented a new script-mining feature, GHash. IO Multipool, which enabled users to mine the most financially rewarding coins at any given moment and benefit from additional settings, such as the conversion and the switch settings.

This new feature allowed users to mine new cryptocurrencies and convert them into bitcoins or Litecoins, as well as to set the miner to withdraw from the current job when switching coins. The Multipool-Pro functions on the basis of the proportional reward system — when a given block is mined, the reward is divided up among all workers proportionally according to the size of their share.

Due to the popularity of Ghash. This kind of attack occurs when a single miner or mining pool is able to mine multiple bitcoin block rewards in a row. This would be a problem for the bitcoin network, because it hypothetically allows the mining pool to double-spend bitcoins. In July , the GHash.

Since it is currently difficult to develop a long-term solution to this problem, the participants agreed to implement some temporary measures. IO released a voluntary statement, promising that it will not exceed We focus on key factors that may affect Bitcoin's difficulty in this guide. If you're looking for how profitable ASIC miners are in , see this guide.

So let's start by looking at how Bitcoin difficulty has changed every 4 months for the past 3 years:. Sep - As of 19th December , many difficulty charts, including the one above, seem to be displaying outdated data. We've posted a video explaining the cause of this here. Looking at the Blockchain chart above for the past 2 years, it definitely looks exponential; e.

But the figures for the past 3 years don't do that, they vary significantly. In it took around 11 months for the difficulty to double, in early around 6 months, in late around 8 months and then in between months. Rather than doubling at a consistent interval, it seems to vary based on factors like available hardware and public interest. What we're suggesting is that the rate Bitcoin difficulty is increasing is not fixed, and can be anticipated. Right now, in December , Bitcoin is very popular, with thousands of new investors and miners every day - so significant difficulty increases are to be expected.

Many new people are interested in bitcoin mining, allowing hardware manufacturers to sell miners in larger quantities, causing more total hashpower to be available - driving Bitcoin difficulty up.

The key relationship here is that the amount of new hardware becoming available is strongly linked to the demand for it. A risk is that if the people making these miners produce too many, the difficulty will rise so fast that Bitcoin mining profitability goes down massively.

This occurred for Dash when the Antminer D3 came out. There are also scenarios that can cause Bitcoin's difficulty to decrease. August is a good example of this, where a lot of miners moved their hashpower to mine Bitcoin Cash as it was more profitable at the time. This decreased hashpower mining Bitcoin, causing Bitcoin's difficulty to decrease for 2 weeks.

If you stay up-to-date with these types of scenarios and mine the more profitable coins Bitcoin Cash in this scenario , you can get extra coins for 2 weeks and sell them immediately for a great return on investment or just HODL them! Another argument suggesting Bitcoin mining will remain profitable long-term is to look at it from the perspective of large mining operations.

If you were a miner running a large setup, and Bitcoin mining was to no longer be profitable, then you'd likely start mining something else that was. If there were no profitable coins for a long period of time, you'd likely have very high operating costs and be forced to shut down your operation eventually. For a smaller miner running just a few Antminers or some cloud mining, this would be less of an issue.

So in theory as long as Bitcoin stays popular and its price continues to increase, if you can get cheap electricity Bitcoin mining should always stay profitable. This last argument in particular is very speculative, so be aware that for a worst-case scenario if Bitcoin's price was to fall for a long-period of time, even if you had cheap electricity, there's a risk that mining it would no longer be profitable. In June , the reward for Bitcoin mining will half.