The bitcoin network has just seen one of its biggest adjustment in mining difficulty. According to data from BTC.com, the mining difficulty has posted an increase of nearly 15% from 13.73T to 15.78T.

The difficulty that retargets every two weeks, or 2016 blocks, has previously undergone a compounded 15.29% fall after two consecutive decreases since bitcoin’s third halving.

Bitcoin mining difficulty rate is a metric that shows how hard it is for miners to solve bitcoin blocks to receive the bitcoin reward. If miners stop mining en masse, the difficulty will decrease; when more miners contribute to the network’s hash rate, the difficulty increases.

Miners have been experiencing the largest rise in bitcoin mining difficulty since January 2018. The upward metric indicates that mining machines have been coming back to the bitcoin network in large numbers over the past 14 days after the May halving.

The mining difficulty data suggests that the competition among bitcoin miners is heating up again and intensifying at an accelerated rate. While data suggests that mining difficulty is set to increase another 14.38% in 14 days.

Similarly, bitcoin hash rate, the amount of computing power devoted to securing the network, has also posted one of the biggest increases of any two-week difficulty adjustment cycle since 2019. Bitcoin hashrate has been seen recover 14% to 110 EH/s from June 4^th 98.30 EH/s.

This is in line with predictions that bitcoin mining farms in China’s southwestern region have been plugging in machines to take advantage of cheap hydroelectricity during the rainy summer season (which starts from May to October).

It seems that miners in China’s bitcoin mining concentrations Sichuan and Yunnan are less affected by the recent hydropower restrictions and security inspection, or, that those small/illegal miners authorities there want to crack down have early been squeezed out.

Data from ByteTree shows that bitcoin miners have started to hodl more of the newly generated BTC at the time when BTC is still failing to breach the psychologically important level of $10,000 and when BTC mining set to become even more difficult. The positive metrics from the mining sector may instill confidence into the crypto market.