The difficulty of mining in the Bitcoin network has decreased by about 11.16% over the last 24 hours – the strongest such movement since the Chinese crackdown on mining in 2021. The effect: BTC mining has temporarily become noticeably easier, although miners' profitability still looks weak.
According to CoinWarz, the difficulty is currently 125.86 T (since block 935 429), and the average block time is about 9.47 min. The next difficulty adjustment (scheduled for February 20) is expected to bring an increase of about 5.63% to 132.96 T.
What caused such a strong drop? One possible catalyst was the winter storm in the USA, which hit the energy infrastructure and led to temporary power consumption restrictions for some mines. At one point, Foundry USA – the largest BTC pool – had briefly lost about 60% of its power, dropping from nearly 400 EH/s to about 198 EH/s.
The background remains challenging: the hashprice on February 2 dropped to a historical low of $33.31 PH/s/day, and according to Checkonchain, the average cost of mining 1 BTC is around $87,000, with the price of bitcoin around $69,500. "The Block’s 2026 Mining Outlook" also indicates that the share of transaction fees in miners' revenues shrank from about 7% to about 1%.
