Bitcoins hashrate & difficulty levels have been on an epic bull run

A year ago on Aug 24 2017, the mining difficulty and hash rate was considered to be off the charts high. The network was battle tested for over 8 years and the hashpower just kept increasing nearly the whole time. 1 year ago the the idea of becoming a profitable miner required a seriously major investment...I recall thinking that "this hash rate rate can't possibly continue to climb at this rate, it MUST be near the max."

3 days ago was Aug 24 2018...a full year later and the Bitcoin mining difficulty increased to 6,727,225,469,722....One year earlier it was 888,171,856,257 you see how many times it doubled in the last year? The predicted increase for the next adjustment is 7.1%!!

Now a 7.1% increase of last years difficulty level is considered a lot, but 7.1% of the current level is like adding 50% to what it was a year ago. That's hard to comprehend it's so high, and this is a bear market, right? Who could be investing so heavily into mining?

The power of this compounding growth is simply incredible....The money going into large mega scale Bitcoin mining is unfathomabley huge...Is there estimates or data regarding how much fiat is being invested into mining? How much fiat is going into R&D of state of the art tiny nanometer ASICs?

If mining hashpower was not a relevant metric for Bitcoin price valuation a year ago, it most certainly is today and is becoming more and more relevant every 2 weeks. We are talking serious investment.

To put this in perspective the last 2 difficulty increases alone, are very near equal to the entire difficulty of the network this time last year!! That's over 8.5 years of Bitcoin mining hashpower growth in just 4 weeks.

Holy F'n Sh1t! Miners and venture capital have been very very busy and surprisingly it's not so overt.

At this rate it will double in 3 months...would that happen in a bear market? To me this is some of the most bullish data available. I also live in Quebec and in the last few months it's become known the miners are here in a big way.

This site is an excellent tool to reference the hashpower and difficulty over time. (There are several good sites, I just like this one) https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Submitted August 28, 2018 at 04:46AM by Rellim03 http://bit.ly/2MTDmtB