• Bitcoin mining difficulty rebounds 15% as US miners recover from winter outages Bitcoin’s mining difficulty climbed to 144.4 trillion after January storms briefly slashed hash rate, while some US miners offset downtime by selling electricity back to the grid. • Cointelegraph in your social feed Bitcoin’s mining difficulty jumped about 15% to 144.4 trillion on Feb. • 20, according to CoinWarzdata, reversing an 11% drop earlier this month that marked the sharpest decline since China’s 2021 mining ban. • The earlier decline followed a sharp drop in hash rate after severe winter storms swept across much of the United States, disrupting power grids and forcing miners offline. • In late January, Foundry USA, thelargest mining pool by hash rate, briefly saw its computing power fall to about 198 exahashes per second from nearly 400 EH/s, before recovering. • Hash rate measures the total computing power securing the network, while mining difficulty adjusts every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, to keep block production near its 10-minute target.
Article Summaries:
- Bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose 15 % to 144.4 trillion on Feb. 20, reversing an 11 % drop earlier in the month that followed a sharp hash‑rate decline caused by severe winter storms across the United States. The storms disrupted power grids, forcing major U.S. miners-including Foundry USA-to shut down temporarily. As operations resumed, hash rate rebounded, prompting the difficulty adjustment that keeps block times near the 10‑minute target. The higher difficulty boosts network security but raises the computational effort needed for block rewards, tightening miners’ margins. U.S. operators also monetized grid curtailments during the storm, selling excess power back to the grid.
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