The latest on-chain data reveals that Bitcoin (BTC) mining difficulty has soared to new all-time highs, despite the 10% drop in BTC’s value during the past week.

On August 22, difficulty increased by 6.17% at the network's most recent biweekly automated readjustment.

Not only did this push difficulty to new highs, but it also marked Bitcoin's sixth-largest difficulty increase of 2023, according to data from monitoring site BTC.com.

Difficulty reflects both miner competitiveness and Bitcoin network security, and its rising trend shows that miners are not currently hurting financially.

The next automated readjustment is already scheduled to continue the trend, exceeding 56 trillion for the first time.

A similar tale can be told about hash rate, which is the expected hashing deployment by miners on the Bitcoin network.

While exact calculations are inconceivable, depending on the source, the hash rate is already pushing existing all-time highs of around 400 exahashes per second (EH/s).

In response to the statistics, MAC_D, a contributor to the on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, stated that network participants had "high confidence in the security and reliability" of both Bitcoin and the largest altcoin Ether (ETH).

Sources:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-new-peak-btc-price-dip

https://cryptopotato.com/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-soars-to-new-ath-as-btc-price-struggles/

https://btc.com/stats/diff