Bitcoin (BTC<\/a>) may have tanked to six-month lows<\/a> this week, but under the hood, the network is now verifiably stronger than ever.<\/p>\n Data from on-chain monitoring resources including Glassnode<\/a> and BTC.com<\/a> confirms that as of Friday, the Bitcoin network difficulty is at a new all-time high.<\/p>\n The difficulty, which expresses how much miners need to work to solve the equations to process transactions on the blockchain, is arguably the most important of fundamental\u00a0Bitcoin network components.<\/p>\n The metric automatically adjusts to increase or decrease mining effort according to miner participation \u2014 the more competition among miners, the higher the difficulty.<\/p>\n This has the effect of keeping mining stable regardless of factors such as sentiment, price or unintended incidents.<\/p>\n After dipping in mid-2021, difficulty took the rest of the year to bounce back, with the latest automated readjustment adding 9.32% to the previous level. With that, it entered unexplored territory above 26 trillion.<\/p>\n Commenting on the event, cryptocurrency journalist and commentator Colin Wu noted<\/a> that the increase is the highest in over half a year, with BTC.com data confirming that late August saw the last adjustment of more than 10%.<\/p>\n The difficulty thus logically followed the hash rate higher, this having continually set new record highs last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n Related:\u00a0Breaking \u2018bear market\u2019 in Bitcoin demand will spark next BTC price surge \u2014 Analysts<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The hash rate, an estimate of the processing power dedicated to the blockchain by miners, currently sits at 192 exahashes per second (EH\/s), having briefly reached 218 EH\/s on Jan. 10, according to MiningPoolStats<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n As Cointelegraph often <\/a>reports<\/a>, an old mantra among age-old hodlers is that \u201cprice follows hash rate,\u201d this trend nonetheless taking a back seat for many as fundamentals move in the opposite direction to spot price.<\/p>\n The growing hash rate thus implies that on longer timeframes, miner optimism over the profitability of their operations remains. Calculations last week revealed<\/a> their break-even point<\/a> to lie at around $34,000.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nDifficulty passes 26 trillion for the first time<\/h2>\n
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<\/figure>\nBTC price dip fails to break miner resolve<\/h2>\n
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