A new record of BTC mining difficulty will be set this week

Competition between bitcoin miners is about to intensify, as mining complexity prepares to set a new all-time high, the second in a row.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to compete for the reward of mining a block. This metric may skip the 30 T level and go straight to 31.37 T, rising 5.29% according to the BTC.com mining pool estimate.

This increase follows an increase of nearly 5.6% noted two weeks ago, when the difficulty reached the 29 T range for the first time in the network’s history.

Meanwhile, bitcoin’s hash rate, or computing power of the network, remained virtually unchanged.

Over the same period, however, bitcoin’s mining profitability has fallen much more dramatically, by nearly 13%. Over the past 14 days, the price of BTC has dropped 23% from $39,390 (April 27) to $31,315 (the evening of May 10).

Bitcoin’s mining complexity adjusts about every two weeks, or more precisely, every 2016 blocks, to maintain a 10-minute block generation time.

According to ByteTree, miners have spent significantly more mined BTC than saved in recent weeks.