A few weeks before the next halving, the mining industry is turning up the heat. According to Blockchain.com, the hash rate is currently at an all-time high of 614 exahashes per second. A year ago, it was only half that. As a result, the difficulty rate of mining has also reached a new high. It currently stands at 83.95 trillion hashes.

The hash rate measures the total computing power in the Bitcoin network. It correlates with a time delay to the difficulty, that is, the computational power required to produce a new Bitcoin block.

The difficulty is readjusted every 2016 blocks and thus about every two weeks. The more hashrate flows into the network, the more resources it takes to produce a block.

The effort that miners are apparently making at the moment is paying off with the recent sharp rise in the Bitcoin price. At the beginning of the week, total revenue in a single day was around US$79 million for the first time.

Bitcoin halving

For the upcoming halving, miners seem to want to dust off as much Bitcoin as possible. During the halving, the block reward, or the amount of Bitcoin issued to miners per block, will be halved from the current 6.25 Bitcoin to 3.125 Bitcoin in the future.

This could initially lead to a significant loss of revenue for the mining industry. According to an analysis by CoinShares, only five of the 14 miners will remain profitable after the halving.

Halving takes place every 210,000 blocks and thus approximately every four years. According to current estimates, the next one will take place on April 23, in just under 5,000 blocks. In the long run, the Bitcoin price could rise due to the constant supply shortage. This in turn would benefit the miners.