In recent weeks the bitcoin hashrate seems to have stabilised at more or less 40 million TH/s, as a result, the safety of the blockchain has also improved in 2018.
A year ago, the hashrate was around 20 million TH/s.
In other words, in 12 months, despite the significant decline in the value of BTC, the bitcoin hashrate has practically doubled.
But why did the miners increase the computing power invested in bitcoin mining in 2018, despite the fall in prices?
In reality, this increase in 2018 is due to the price increase in 2017, because prices vary very quickly, while the overall computing power has significant inertia and, as a result, varies very slowly. So at first, it was the price go up, followed subsequently by the computing power.
This may seem curious and counterintuitive, but it means that the miners over the past 12 months have decided to increase the computing power invested in bitcoin mining while knowing full well that they would have gained less because of the fall in prices.
And, in doing so, they have also increased the safety of the blockchain.
In fact, the greater the hashrate, the greater the difficulty of mining and therefore the security. So when the hashrate grows, as a result, the difficulty of validating newly added blocks to the blockchain also increases.
Analysing the blockchain backwards, this difficulty accumulates, making it increasingly difficult to attack the older blocks.
In fact, if you want to attack the Bitcoin blockchain and modify a block, you must also modify all subsequent blocks.
So in 2018 not only did Bitcoin’s hashrate increase, but so did the blockchain’s safety.
The fact that all this happened in a year when the value collapsed is yet another confirmation of the high resilience of this technology that seems to be getting stronger and stronger, regardless of the fluctuations in market prices.
