Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Falls 8% to 133.79 Trillion

Bitcoin's mining difficulty fell nearly 8 percent on March 20, dropping to 133.79 trillion at block height 941,472 and marking the second-largest decline of the year. The adjustment, which reflects a recent slowdown in the network's total computing power, or hashrate, pulled the metric below the 1 zettahash per second threshold to 933.51 exahashes per second.

The Bitcoin protocol automatically recalibrates difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, to maintain an average block production time of 10 minutes. In the period leading to this change, average block times stretched to about 12 minutes and 36 seconds, signaling reduced participation from miners. A lower difficulty eases the computational effort needed to mine blocks, providing immediate relief to operators who remain active by boosting revenue per unit of hashrate.

This drop follows a mid-March decline from around 148 trillion and stands as the sharpest since a weather-related hashrate plunge in early February, when storms in the United States caused power curtailments at major facilities. That earlier event led to a 15 percent rebound as conditions normalized, but analysts describe the current contraction...