Bitcoin Mining Rate Sets a New Milestone Ignoring Bitcoin Gloom
For the first time in the cryptocurrency’s existence, the total network hash rate of Bitcoin just crossed beyond 1000 PH/s, charting an entirely new milestone in mining rates.
It has been a turbulent week for bitcoin. The cryptocurrency saw its price fall last week. Marvel Studios saw the term ‘Civil War’ snatched away by the core group of bitcoin developers and the perceived failure of the ‘bitcoin experiment’ in the aftermath of Mike Hearn’s Medium post and a closely-timed New York Times article covering the former bitcoin core developer and now an employee of R3 – a banking consortium developing its own distributed ledger solutions similar and dissimilar to bitcoin’s blockchain.
The world’s media caught on everywhere, making headlines of Bitcoin’s death, again, and the former core developer who sold his bitcoins.
However, all of the above hasn’t deterred the mining community.
It now stands to record that the total network hash rate of Bitcoin spiked over a billion GH/s, registering a rate of quintillion hashes or 1 Exahash (1 EH = 10^18) per second, for the first time ever.
The new scaling record could be regarded as a marked message from miners who, in-spite of the fall in recent bitcoin prices and the furore of mainstream media’s most recent coverage of the cryptocurrency, are steadfast in their productivity to add to the blockchain.
The reason or means behind the spike make for idle speculation right now. Plausible reasons include a new mining center or a group of mining centers coming online. BitFury recently announced the mass production of its 16nm ASIC chips which CEO Valery Vavilov said would help aid usher in the “exahash era.”
However, the increase in hash power does show a renewed commitment to the cryptocurrency, either by individual miners or large-scale industrial miners to spend their resources on mining the cryptocurrency.
The new peak hash rate record was set at 1.042 EH/s, according to figures revealed by Blockchain.info.
Featured image from Shutterstock. Chart from Blockchain.info.
