The Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty, the average difficulty level for mining a block on the network, climbed to a new all-time high of 134.7 trillion on Friday.
Network difficulty hit a previous all-time high in August and steadily rose throughout the month, despite projections that network difficulty would decrease.
Bitcoin’s hashrate, the average of the total number of hashes per second from all miners on the network, has fallen to 967 billion hashes per second, down from the all-time high of over 1 trillion hashes per second recorded on August 4, according to CryptoQuant.
Higher difficulty has created tighter operating conditions for large mining firms in an already competitive industry that runs on narrow profit margins.
The need to expend ever-greater computing resources to mine blocks on the BTC network has also raised concerns over the centralization of Bitcoin mining, as the cost of mining becomes progressively more expensive, leading to domination by large corporations and mining pools.
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Solo miners still have hope in a sea of large, institutional players
Despite large players increasingly dominating the Bitcoin mining space, small and solo miners are still successfully mining blocks on occasion, and claiming the 3.125 BTC block reward valued at over $344,000 at the time of this writing.
Three solo miners defied the odds by successfully adding blocks to the BTC ledger and claiming the block reward in July and August.
The first miner added block 903,883 on July 3, netting just under $350,000 in block subsidy rewards plus priority fees paid by network participants to miners to ensure their transactions are included in the block.
The second solo miner added block 907,283 on July 26, claiming over $373,000 in rewards, when calculated using Bitcoin prices at the time.
On August 17, another solo miner mined block 910,440, nabbing $373,000 in block subsidy rewards and network fees. All three miners were operating through the Solo CK pool, a solo mining pool service.
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