In January 2025, the difficulty of Bitcoin mining reached historic highs.
On the other hand, however, the growth of the hashrate has stopped. In February, however, it is recovering.
All this reveals that January was a month with mixed data regarding Bitcoin mining, while February started with a sort of return to normality.
Bitcoin mining: the current hashrate level
The variations in hashrate are what consequently generate the variations in difficulty. Therefore, it is necessary to start from here.
Taking into consideration the seven-day moving average of the daily hashrate, it is found that during the first days of January, new all-time highs were reached, above 820 Eh/s.
However, starting from January 7, there was a sharp decline.
It should be remembered that the hashrate also largely depends on the price of Bitcoin on the crypto markets, because all the miners’ earnings occur in BTC.
On January 7th, not by chance, the price of BTC suddenly dropped from $101,000 to $97,000, and then continued to decline the following day to $91,000.
On January 13th, it then reached the lowest price peak since mid-December when it first rose above $108,000, even dropping below $90,000 for a brief moment.
At that point, within just six days, the average weekly hashrate had dropped from more than 820 Eh/s to less than 780.
Note that the average weekly hashrate from mid-December onwards was just over 770 Eh/s, and that the decline in mid-January continued until the 27th of the month, when it precisely reached 770 Eh/s.
However, this dynamic was not influenced solely by the mid-month price drop.
The difficulty of Bitcoin mining
The difficulty of mining Bitcoin automatically adjusts approximately every two weeks. It is used to keep the block-time always more or less around 10 minutes, and it increases when the hashrate increases, and vice versa.
Therefore, it is not surprising that from mid-October to mid-January it did nothing but grow, reaching the new all-time high above 110 T.
However, in particular, the increase on January 12 turned out to be excessive, in light of what was happening to the hashrate, and that is why following that increase, the hashrate further decreased.
The fact is that when the difficulty increases, the costs of mining also increase, and an increase in the cost of mining right after the price of BTC had fallen forced several miners to shut down the less efficient machines.
This caused a further drop in the hashrate, down to the minimum peak at the end of January.
Obviously, however, after two weeks, the difficulty then decreased automatically, as it was evidently too high.
This drop in difficulty occurred precisely on January 27, and it was quite significant, although not a record. So it’s no coincidence that starting from January 28, the average hashrate began to rise again.
The data of February
Thanks to the drop in difficulty at the end of January, and to a Bitcoin price that in those days had also risen above $105,000, the hashrate started to grow again.
In fact, the seven-day moving average ended up recording a new all-time high yesterday, over 840 Eh/s.
In the meantime, however, the price of BTC has fallen below $100,000 again, so today the hashrate is declining, and this decline could continue in the coming days.
It is necessary to clarify, if there is still a need, that the variations in the Bitcoin mining hashrate do not affect the price of BTC, and instead, on the contrary, it is the price of BTC that affects the variation of the hashrate.
The impact on the price of Bitcoin
Such dynamics, however, can also have some impact on the price of BTC, from time to time.
In particular, the key point from this point of view is the sales of BTC by the miners.
For almost a year now, miners have been earning 3.125 BTC for each block mined, and with a block mined approximately every 10 minutes, the total earnings are 450 BTC per day, equivalent to about 44 million dollars.
Given that the daily volume of Bitcoin spot traded overall on crypto markets is over 60 billion dollars, the 44 million from the hypothetical sales by miners are not much.
However, it should be remembered that miners often try not to sell all the Bitcoin they receive, thus creating accumulations to be able to sell the BTC when the price is higher. This actually has very little impact on the price of Bitcoin.
However, if the miners go through a period of significant difficulty, they might be forced to sell the BTC accumulated over time even at low prices, and this could negatively impact the market, especially at times when the price trend of Bitcoin is already experiencing difficulties for other reasons.
In this period, however, it does not seem that this is happening.
