While Bitcoin price starts 2022 with a slump, mining difficulty is on the rise

cointelegraph.com:

Since the start of 2022, Bitcoin (BTC) has seen a decline in price by more than 40% from its all-time high (ATH) of $69,044.77 on Nov 10, 2021.

This price volatility hasn’t affected the network's ability to increase miners’ difficulty to obtain Bitcoin. As competition among miners continues to grow, Bitcoin’s difficulty reached a new ATH for the second time in two months. The hash rate has also experienced a steady climb of 45% in 6 months after last July’s lows.

The Bitcoin network difficulty is determined by the overall computational power, which co-relates to the difficulty in confirming transactions and mining BTC.

To confirm a block and obtain its reward, miners encounter more opposition as the difficulty goes up. Those miners not able to catch up have been pushed out of the race. This dilemma between miners securing the network and deriving enough profits is likely to continue to play out as they determine the feasibility of their current operations.

Measurements of the hash rate for the network also reported hitting new ATHs following a similar trend to Bitcoin’s difficulty metrics. The Bitcoin network seems to be at its peak in terms of security, as the more hashing power the network uses, the more distributed the work is for each transaction that takes place on-chain. 

Since there is no standard agreement to calculate these metrics, different hash rate highs have been recorded over the last few weeks. Despite the different approaches used, a common consensus that both the hash rate and mining difficulty have been climbing since the last drop in July 2021. 

Bitcoin mining is the process of adding new transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain. Using proof-of-work (PoW), miners compete to solve mathematical problems that