Bitcoin mining difficulty rises by forty percent in thirty days

Statistics show that the difficulty of mining bitcoins has increased by 40 percent in the past thirty days. The increase appears to be due to BitFury’s recent opening of a new data center in Georgia’s capital.

The 40MW data center uses a two-phase immersion cooling system. The racks are immersed in Novec, a heat-conducting fluid that is 4,000 times more efficient than air for cooling purposes. With 250kW per rack containing 28nm and 16nm asic chips, the data center achieves a power usage effectiveness of 1.02. With the new 16nm chips, BitFury achieves between 0.055 joules per gigahash and 0.07 joules per gigahash.

Such a data center can affect the difficulty of mining bitcoin, as the increasing speed at which hashes are cracked causes the block difficulty to go up. The difficulty increases every 2016 blocks and this is a central part of the system’s way of working. The hashrate is around 650 Petahashes per second at the time of writing and has also increased significantly in recent days.