Mining difficulty jumps almost 6 percent today: why Bitcoin miners have no cushion this time

Select what genuinely interests you. Your picks feed directly into our editorial planning. Weekly. 60 seconds. Carefully curated by our editors: no hype, no promo flood, no spam. The Bitcoin network recalibrates on Friday afternoon. Early in the afternoon, with block 971,712, mining difficulty rises by an estimated 5.9 percent. That is the steepest increase since June 27, and it follows a stretch in which practically nothing moved. The price stands at $82,298 on Friday morning, 1.3 percent above the previous day. For the price question of the coming days, what counts is less the figure itself than what it demands of the miners. The data-centre operators deliver the same block reward for more computing work, and right now they have no fee cushion to absorb it.

First reported by CryptoTicker.io. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.