One of the first consequences of the third halving in the history of Bitcoin, which had occurred little more than a week, has been the reduction of the hash rate, or accumulated power of processing of the miners in the network. With this reduction, the network has been congested, and, currently, that is clearly reflected in transaction fees that has not been seen since almost a year ago. Data of Coin Metrics show a average commissions per transaction above the equivalent of 2.5 dollars since last may 12, the date of the reduction of rewards from mining. In that period, during the last few days, this Monday the 18th, there was a peak of close to 6 dollars on average, reflects the same graph of Coin Metrics. The same source shows that the last time that average had exceeded the equivalent of 2 dollars was in early July of 2019. And the levels of the peak of this Monday not seen since the last week of June of that same year. Specifically, on the 27th of that month there were commissions with an average of 6.1 dollars. Since the mid of 2019 did not see the current averages of transaction fees in Bitcoin. Source: Coin Metrics. At the time of drafting this note, the average commissions for that transaction in the next block round the 51.300 satoshis, according to bitcoinfees.earn.com. This equates, at the current price of BTC, about 4,9 dollars. After the halving, the output of mining equipment with low profitability or which would be without profit led to a drop in the hash rate greater than 16%, as reported Breaking News the last may 14, two days before the event. Previously, the processing power in the network approached record levels in the moments prior to the halving. The latest record of Coin Metrics shows a little more of 80 EH/s for the 17th of may. Although measurements of the processing power on a short-term are imprecise, various sources consulted show levels that are fairly distant to the 137 EH/s the maximum.
Difficulty: how to reduce congestion of the network in budding?
In the new update the difficulty of mining Bitcoin, there was a decrease consistent with the reduced ability of cumulative processing that owns the network currently. The variation with respect to the previous period is 6%, as has been confirmed by Alejandro de la Torre, vice president of Poolin, one of the mining groups of more well-known in the environment of Bitcoin. The difficulty went 16.1 T to 15.4 T. The decrease in difficulty should reduce the commissions, high currently due to the congestion in the network. In theory, the lower the difficulty, the miners are currently operating in the network could undermine the more quickly the blocks and include transactions in them. For the moment, more than 53,000 transactions are still awaiting confirmation on the network of Bitcoin. The commissions of the last few blocks, according to mempool.space, remain above the 100 sat/byte.