Why does the hash rate of the Bitcoin blockchain keep going up?
Why does the hash rate of the Bitcoin blockchain keep going up?
Quote of the day, "Curiosity leads to humility"
The hash rate of the Bitcoin blockchain is at a new all time high. The hash rate indicates how many miners are on the network, how difficult it is to find the next block, how difficult it would be to re-write the history of the blockchain, thus how secure the Bitcoin network is. Let me quote a recent article by Glassnode: “Bitcoin hashrate has reached a new all-time-high of 242 Exahash per second. To give an analogy for scale, that is equivalent to all 7.753 Billion people on earth, each completing a SHA-256 hash calculation approximately 30 Billion times every second” And this is the case even though the price of bitcoin is down about 70% from its all time high.
Since bitcoin started, people have been worried about what will happen to bitcoin security when the block reward that goes to miners drops after two more halvenings. The bitcoin block reward has already been cut in half three times, since inception in 2009. The data so far shows us that the security keeps going up. Mining rigs keep becoming more efficient, miners keep finding cheaper sources of energy and mining is used more and more to improve energy production. There is a motivation by energy producers to mine bitcoin to lower the cost of energy production, this is independent of speculating on bitcoin’s price. Many projects in Africa or elsewhere show this.
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