Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Falls to 146.4 Trillion in 2026

Bitcoin's mining difficulty decreased to 146.4 trillion in the network's first adjustment of 2026, completed on Thursday, providing a modest reprieve for miners facing persistent profitability strains. The recalibration, which occurs approximately every two weeks or 2,016 blocks, aims to maintain an average block production time of 10 minutes. At the time of the change, blocks were being produced slightly faster, at about 9.88 minutes, prompting the protocol to lower the difficulty metric from levels at the end of 2025.

This adjustment marks a brief easing after a year of escalating challenges for the mining sector. Throughout 2025, difficulty reached record highs, peaking at 155.9 trillion in November before settling around 148.2 trillion by year's end. The increase reflected growing computational power on the network, driven by investments in new hardware, but it intensified competition just as block rewards had been halved in April 2024, cutting the subsidy from 6.25 to 3.125 bitcoin per block. Miners reported squeezed margins, with the hash price, a measure of revenue per unit of computing power, falling below 35 dollars per petahash per second per day in November, under...