Bitcoin Block Difficulty to Decrease by 27% — Miners Prepare for BTC’s Biggest Difficulty Drop

Bitcoin is the leading crypto asset in terms of market capitalization, and the cryptocurrency’s network hash rate has dropped significantly over the past two weeks. On Saturday, July 3, the network’s mining difficulty will see its largest epoch drop in history as the difficulty will drop by more than 27%.
Bitcoin Difficulty Expected to Drop by More Than 27% This weekend, Bitcoin (BTC) will experience its largest ever difficulty drop in the crypto asset's lifetime. At the time of writing, BTC's mining difficulty is 19.93 Trillion and is expected to drop by 27.04% by Saturday morning (EDT). In Bitcoin mining, the network's difficulty is the parameter that keeps the average time between BTC blocks consistent.
The difficulty parameter is a measure of how difficult it is to mine a Bitcoin block. The higher the difficulty, the more computing power is required to find a block.

If the difficulty drops by 27% on Saturday, it is expected to be around 14.54 trillion.
When the mining difficulty on the network is low, it is easier for Bitcoin miners to find blocks. A rising difficulty along with the hash rate means that an attacker will have to expend a lot of resources to compromise the system.
Bitcoin’s upcoming difficulty change comes at a time when Chinese miners have been told to operate elsewhere and a large portion of hashrate went offline last Monday. During the last BTC difficulty change at block height 687,456 on June 13, 2021, the global hash rate was around 142.68 exahash per second (EH/s).
Since block 687,456, BTC’s hashrate has dropped 39% to 86.5 EH/s. Prior to Saturday’s expected 27% drop, Bitcoin’s network difficulty had already dropped twice.
November 2020 and October 2011 preceded the largest difficulty drops in Bitcoin’s history To date, BTC’s largest difficulty drop ever occurred on October 30, 2011, the day before Halloween.

The difficulty drop on Saturday, July 3, 2021 will be the largest epoch drop in Bitcoin’s history.
At this point, the difficulty slipped 18.03% at BTC block height 151200 when the global hashrate was a meager 8.61 terahash per second (TH/s). For some perspective, a single next-generation Bitcoin miner built by Microbt or Bitmain today has a hashrate of around 100 TH/s.
Interestingly, BTC did not see a significant drop like it did in 2011 until block height 655,200 recorded on November 3, 2020.
Typically, BTC’s difficulty has risen more times than it has fallen in its lifetime. At Bitcoin block height 685,440, BTC’s mining difficulty fell by 15.97% on May 29, when the hashrate was about 150 EH/s.
Block times are expected to stabilize, hashrate is expected to increase At today’s hashrate of 86.5 EH/s and the current difficulty of 19.93 trillion, block times average over ten minutes. After the Bitcoin difficulty change on Saturday, the time between blocks should smooth out back to an average of closer to ten minutes.
Since June 29, BTC's hashrate has increased significantly, with 30-day hashrate statistics showing that the network's hashrate was only 66 EH/s on that day. Saturday's difficulty change is not only a milestone, but will also make it easier for miners to continue to increase resources. (NetEase)