The first day of 2022 turned out to be a big one for the world’s pioneer cryptocurrency, as Bitcoin saw its Hashrate Reach a lifetime high of about 209.39 exahash per second (EH/s). There has been an increase of 47.92% in the hashrate of Bitcoin in the last 12 months, as it stood at 141.55 EH/s on January 3rd, 2021. The security and processing power that is dedicated to the Bitcoin (BTC) network hasn’t been higher, as the network managed to reach a milestone in the start of 2022. Even at the time of writing, thee hashrate was still coasting along the same zone.
As a matter of fact, the last 30-day statistics indicated that the hashrate had actually tapped the 224.32 EH/s mark on Saturday. On December 8, 2021, the Bitcoin network’s hashrate had reached 194/95 EH/s. It should also be noted that it wasn’t just Bitcoin that managed to reach a high hashrate, as Ethereum (ETH) network also saw its hashrate reach an all-time high of about 1 petahash per second (PH/s). Bitcoin’s hashrate had plummeted on June 28th, 2021, when China had announced its crackdown against the crypto miners. The network’s hashrate had fallen drastically back then to reach 69.11 EH/s.
Since that day, the network has seen its hashrate grow 202.98% because most of the bitcoin mining operations based in China had decided to relocate to other regions. The largest bitcoin mining pool right now is Foundry USA, which is contributing global hashpower of about 19.45% of the total, which is around 34.79 EH/s. In terms of global hashrate, the second-largest mining pool is Antpool, which has a hashrate of 30.25 EH/s, or about 16.91%. Only 11 known bitcoin mining pools can be found today and stealth or unknown hash miners are responsible for contributing about 3.81% of the global hashrate.
In the last two epochs, Bitcoin miners have seen mining difficulty go up. There was an 8.33% increase in difficulty on December 11th and it went up by 0.32% on December 25th. The next change in the difficulty level of bitcoin mining will bring it very close to its all-time high of 25 trillion. The difficulty is expected to go up once more by almost 2.90% to reach 24.8 million in less than five days. Mining was one of the biggest bitcoin trends of 2021 and it is expected to continue in 2022 as well. Meanwhile, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, has made six predictions about the leading cryptocurrency for this year.
His country had made Bitcoin legal tender, along with the US dollar, back in September 2021. On January 1st, he tweeted some of his predictions, the first of which is that the price of Bitcoin will reach the $100,000 mark. Moreover, he also believes that two other countries would follow the same route as El Salvador and adopt bitcoin as legal tender. After making bitcoin its national currency, the country has made several purchases of bitcoin. The latest statistics indicate that it owns about 1,391 BTC altogether.
It should also be noted that El Salvador’s president is not the only one who believes other countries will adopt bitcoin as legal tender. Alex Hoeptner, the chief executive of one of the leading crypto and bitcoin exchanges, Bitmex, had predicted last year in October that at least five countries would adopt it as legal tender. He had said that these would be developing countries. Apart from that, the El Salvadorian president also believes that construction of Bitcoin City will begin this year. He had announced plans of building the city back in November, where no taxes would be charged on Bitcoin and the city would be powered by bitcoin bonds and a volcano.
Bukele also believes that there would be oversubscription of these volcano bonds. He went on to say that the Miami Bitcoin Conference in 2022 would have a big surprise and BTC would also play a major role in US elections.
