Last Updated on December 9, 2022 by Bitfinsider

First-time Bitcoin miners must fully comprehend the significance of Bitcoin’s difficulty adjustment and its effect on mining profitability. Many newbies to bitcoin mining will consult a mining calculator to determine the profitability of an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), assuming that this profitability will remain relatively constant in the future. This is incorrect, as the profitability of any individual machine tends to decline with time. Before purchasing an ASIC, it is necessary to comprehend how difficulty increases.

ASICs can be understood simply by comparing them to any other electrical device. The longer a gadget is in use, the less important it becomes, because new software demands greater processing power. If you were to use an iPhone from six years ago, you would be extremely frustrated by its performance. The older a phone is, the less useful it becomes.

In mining, a very similar procedure is followed. When mining, you are in competition with every other miner in the world. As more miners utilize automation, competition becomes increasingly challenging. You are more competitive if you have newer and more efficient hardware, but that hardware is soon becoming less competitive.

The Bitcoin protocol incorporates difficulty adjustment to provide a consistent and predictable supply schedule. If there were no difficulty adjustment, all of the Bitcoin would have been mined by now, and miners would have little motivation to secure the network. As a result of an increase in hash rate, blocks are generated at a faster pace when additional miners join the network. The network replies by increasing the difficulty to ensure blocks are generated every 10 minutes. Increased difficulty changes result in decreased income for miners. This means that the Bitcoin network is more secure for the typical Bitcoin user.

As a result of the decline in hash rate brought about by downward difficulty adjustments, miners will receive a greater profit. A notable instance of this was when China outlawed Bitcoin mining and a significant chunk of the network’s hash rate was offline for a while. As mining technology continues to become more powerful and efficient, downward difficulty adjustments are not common. Even if machine efficiency and hash rate stagnated, other machines would be manufactured and plugged in. The Bitcoin mining sector is quite immature and there is a great deal of space for expansion in the future, which implies that the hash rate will almost probably increase at a high rate in the future.

We are currently having a bull market in energy prices and a depressed bitcoin price, which is causing considerable suffering for miners. As hash rate decreases, it is possible that there may be a series of downward difficulty changes, but miners should not account for this in their models. It is essential to prepare for the worst-case situation, as we have witnessed over the past few months.