Bitcoin mining difficulty drops 5% after Xinjiang’s miner shutdown

The mining difficulty is how the network aims to keep blocks being produced at an even rate, despite a wildly fluctuating hash rate.

But on June 9, miners in Xinjiang’s Zhundong Economic and Technology Development Zone received orders to close operations — a result of the China State Council’s high-level comment about cracking down on bitcoin trading and mining activities.

From the last adjustment to June 9, Bitcoin’s average block production interval was around 9.9 minutes, close to the intended 10-minute-per-block interval, data shows.

The difficulty drop may be welcome news for miners who are still online as their share of the total block subsidies over the next two weeks will increase.

“Tesla only sold ~10% of holdings to confirm BTC could be liquidated easily without moving market.

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