Bitcoin’s hashrate has reached a new ATH (All-Time High) yesterday, touching 90 ExaHash/s. As a matter of fact, it had been well over 50 EH/s for weeks, but yesterday it broke all records.Â
From the end of July, it had stabilised just below 80 EH/S, but by the end of August, it had exceeded that threshold. The previous record was set last Friday, at 86 EH/s, but yesterday it reached 89.56.Â
It is worth noting that only six months ago, in March and April, the average was around 45 EH/s, so yesterday’s peak doubled the average from the previous six months.Â
The new record could be related to the launch of the new ASICs, which have unprecedented performance among Bitmain’s models.Â
This could suggest that yesterday’s record in the next few days or weeks could also be exceeded, considering that the new ASICs have not yet spread. Moreover, it seems that new mining farms are being born in China, following the country’s change of attitude towards bitcoin.Â
Four mining pools, namely BTC.com, F2Pool, Poolin and AntPool, are the main ones, and together they hold more than 57% of the hashrate. However, the total number of mining pools that have managed to mine at least one block in the last seven days is still several dozen.Â
The difficulty is also at an all-time high, as a result of three consecutive rises since the start of August, which have increased it by almost 20% in little more than a month.Â
Given that in the meantime the value of BTC has not increased, these last rises could have affected the profitability of mining activities, although often the most significant increases in the hashrate occur months after the price increases. Therefore, it could even be just a matter of adjusting to the price increase of the first six months of the year.Â
In fact, by the beginning of 2019, the hashrate had fallen to about 33 EH/s, so since then, it has almost tripled, while the price of BTC has risen from about $ 3,700 to the current $ 10,400, a growth which is comparable in proportion. This would seem to explain the reason for the powerful growth of Bitcoin’s hashrate in 2019.Â
Moreover, one of the consequences of the new record is the increase in the cost of a possible 51% attack: to date, a single hour of attack on the Bitcoin network could cost more than 850,000 dollars.Â