Bitcoin mining difficulty rises for first time immediately after a halving amid Runes fee frenzy

Bitcoin mining difficulty rose 2% on Wednesday to hit a new all-time high in the first adjustment since last week’s halving event.

Bitcoin mining difficulty measures how hard it is to mine a new block relative to the easiest it can ever be. It adjusts automatically every 2016 blocks — roughly two weeks — to ensure that, on average, a new block is found every 10 minutes, regardless of how many miners are actively mining.So what’s different this time around? While miners’ block subsidy rewards have now been reduced from 6.25 BTC to 3.

After halving block 840,000 generated $2.4 million in fees — far exceeding the approximate $200,000 worth of block subsidy reward — bitcoin went on a record 104-block run of transaction fee rewards higher than the subsidy, according to the Bitcoin explorer Mempool.In fact, aside from an apparent accidental $3 million overpayment last November, all of Bitcoin's top 10 most valuable blocks have been mined since the halving.

Following the initial hype, average transaction fees dropped considerably from a record high of $128.45 on the day of halving to $34.80 on April 21, per YCharts data. Average fees are now back down to around $5, according to Mempool data. While consolidation of mining operations toward large public companies presents centralization concerns in terms of hash rate, gone are the days when small or home mining operations, more susceptible to the drop in subsidy rewards that accompany each halving, were generally profitable.

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