Bitcoin mining difficulty has decreased by 16.05%, the largest drop in the indicator since October 2011 and the second largest in the history of the crypto, The Block has reported.
The decrease in difficulty has occurred in block 655,200, which was added at 09:28 CET and has resulted in the previous value of 20 T falling to 16.79 T.
The biggest decrease in difficulty took place back in 2011, even before the "ASIC era" began. The second largest fall was recorded on March 26, 2020, after a sharp decline in the cryptocurrency market.
The decrease in the complexity of the mining of the reference crypto coincides with a drop in the hashrate of the Bitcoin network and the resulting slowdown in the block time. In late October, Chinese miners started to shut down their equipment to move it after the end of the rainy season.
Now the difficulty of mining has dropped significantly, the mining time for a block is expected to approach 10 minutes. This, in turn, will have a positive effect on the speed of transactions and reduce processing fees.
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