Bitcoin: Elevated Mining Difficulty Sets 2018 in Motion

Published on 01 January 2018 by Cryptovest Staff

Bitcoin's difficulty adjusted upward at the end of 2018, and the leading digital asset starts the year with more than ten days ahead of heightened difficulty and a slightly slowing hash rate. At the moment, there are still more than 130,000 unconfirmed block transactions, and block time is above 13 minutes, adding to the congestion.

The chief supporter of Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver, believes Bitcoin is a failed project already, and still believes Bitcoin Cash may be the answer.

After@RubinReporthad me on, they received:76 Tips via Bitcoin Cash1 Tip via Bitcoin CoreBitcoin Cash is working well.Bitcoin Core is committing suicide.https://t.co/a0C2BFFfuw

For weeks now, the renewed difficulty algorithm of Bitcoin Cash has been working well, achieving a smoother adjustment and generally managing to keep miners on board. Bitcoin Cash has also seen a wider variety of mining pools joining in. The biggest problem for BCH is that sometimes, empty blocks are mined at much shorter intervals than planned.

But there are still enough Bitcoin purists around, who also believe Bitcoin can overcome the challenges in 2018. One of the more influential Bitcoin voices, WhalePanda, believes that: At the same time, both digital assets are losing their luster and carrying on with a depressed market price. BTC trades at $13,223.10, while BCH has crashed to $2,400 from the recent peaks, and is still hurting from the rather negative effects of the Coinbase launch and accusations of insider trading.

2017 was an amazing year for Bitcoin and I'm not just talking about the price going up. UASF/Segwit was a major milestone. At the same time many people showed their real intentions, we'll remember that. Let's take the lessons we learned in 2017 with us and make 2018 even better.

In 2017, Bitcoin went through several challenges from forked coins, but for now, only Bitcoin Cash supporters have made claims to displacing the leading asset, and have caused a marked effect on Bitcoin mining. Other forked coins have had little effect on the Bitcoin price, or its network speed, due to technological differences.

At the same time, several new coins are making the point that their potentially high transaction speed it a great advantage. In reality, however, extremely high transaction levels rarely materialize, due to slowdowns in the internet infrastructure. At the moment, Bitcoin's top speed is about 7 transactions per second, while test networks can run hundreds of thousand transactions per second. In reality, broadcasting and verifications take time, in addition to mining blocks.

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