The difficulty of Bitcoin mining has fallen by 15.95%, suffering its second largest fall in history. This decrease in the complexity of BTC mining suggests some miners have decided to unplug their devices and stop mining, as reflected in the hashrate of the network. The current complexity is far from the level reached on March 9, when the indicator reached an all-time high of 16.55 trillion hashes.
Yesterday, this level fell to 75.7 EH/s, but soon after it recovered to 99.5 EH/s. Due to this sharp drop in the hashrate, the block extraction time was extended to over 10 minutes.
It looks like a large number of miners, especially owners of Antminer S9 devices and other old models, have been forced to stop mining with their equipment due to the impossibility of maintaining profitability with current prices.
On March 23 it was reported Bitmain had released its new Antminer S19 and Antminer S19 Pro devices.
Mining equipment makers are constantly launching new models with the aim of allowing miners to continue making profits from this activity. In general, mining complexity increases from time to time, which is the reason why users have to acquire new devices in order to continue making profits. However, it looks like this time miners are not willing to buy new devices now their current equipment is not longer profitable, so they have simply decided to unplug their devices and stop mining.
The biggest drop in the complexity of Bitcoin mining took place in October 2011, while the third fall happened in December 2018.
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