Bitcoin Difficulty Rises 0.99% to 127.48T at the August 8 Retarget

Bitcoin's mining difficulty rose 0.99% to 127.48 trillion at the retarget dated 8 August, ending an epoch that had held the requirement flat at 126.23 trillion. Difficulty is the protocol's self-adjusting measure of how hard a block is to find; it resets roughly every two weeks to hold the average block near ten minutes. CoinWarz records the new level at block 963,055, while ViaBTC files the same retarget as epoch 478, rounds the move to 1.0% and leaves the block subsidy unchanged at 3.125 BTC. The adjustment came in above every estimate published ahead of it.

Three forecasts, none of them right

Hashrate Index's 3 August roundup had put the coming adjustment at 0.67%. Pickaxe, writing on 6 August with difficulty still flat, estimated roughly 0.85%. The closest call was published on the morning of the retarget itself, in a Bitcoin News Digest issue that projected 1.00% but placed the resulting difficulty near 127.3 trillion rather than 127.48 trillion. The realised figure sits above all of them. More hashing power was pointed at the network over the epoch than any of the estimators had measured. The move follows a retarget that edged difficulty down 0.74% on 25 July, and it leaves the metric well below where it began the year: CoinDesk reported on 1 August that difficulty had shrunk about 14% from its 2026 high as falling revenue pushed operators to redeploy capacity.

The hashrate record does not agree with itself

A rising difficulty implies a rising hashrate, but the record does not permit a single number. Pickaxe put the network at about 855 exahashes per second on 6 August. That does not match what Hashrate Index had published three days earlier: a seven-day moving average of 932 EH/s and a thirty-day average of 910 EH/s, in its 3 August roundup. The gap between the two mining-specialist estimators is roughly 75-80 EH/s, on different windows and different methods. Neither reconciles to the other.

Hashprice, the daily revenue a miner earns per unit of computing power, is contested in the same way. Hashrate Index recorded $32.10 per petahash per day on 3 August, down 1.3% on the week in dollars but up 0.2% in bitcoin terms at 0.00050222 BTC. The 8 August digest gave a range of $28.90 to $30.60 for the same stretch. Those two ranges do not overlap at any point. The lower one is single-sourced and stands unverified.

What the extra percent costs

Transaction fees averaged 0.0249 BTC per block in the week to 3 August, up 23% on the prior week. That still comes to only about 25 BTC, or roughly $1.57 million, set against block rewards of about 3,222 BTC and roughly $205 million. Fees are well under one percent of what miners are paid. The subsidy and the bitcoin price do essentially all of the work. Breakeven energy costs ran from about $109 per megawatt-hour for the most efficient machines at 14 joules per terahash down to about $41 at 38 J/TH. One 8 August digest put the industry's average all-in production cost at $85,604 per bitcoin, with efficient sites nearer $60,000 and the worst near $95,000; no second outlet carries that figure, so it reads as one estimate, not a settled number. Bitcoin traded around $64,940 on 7 August, a level TheStreet carried that day.

Capacity keeps arriving into a falling margin

The retarget is small in isolation, but it points the same direction as the sector's reported results. MARA and CleanSpark posted a combined $851 million in quarterly losses two days earlier, on revenue down 27% and 30.5% respectively, and both told investors that data-centre and AI capacity, not mining, is where growth comes from now. Machines are still being energised. That is what a positive retarget records, even as the revenue each machine earns keeps compressing. Average block times of 9 minutes 56 seconds in the week to 3 August say the network is running slightly fast, and that is what an upward adjustment corrects. We could not establish from the published record how much hashrate is actually online. Until the two estimators converge, any read on miner margins carries a 75 EH/s error bar.