Bitcoin Difficulty Due to Rise 6% With 76 Blocks Left to Mine

Bitcoin's mining difficulty is due to rise about 6% at block 973,728, and as of 15:36 UTC on Thursday mempool.space put the change at 5.976% with 76 blocks still to mine. The same dashboard had the retarget landing at 17:50 UTC, an estimate that moves with block times and had not come due at the time of writing. Difficulty stands at 140.58 trillion. A rise of that size takes it near 149 trillion, which is below where the measure sat a year ago. Network computing power read 1,076 exahashes a second on the same endpoint.

Five forecasts, one retarget

Difficulty is the setting that keeps blocks arriving about every ten minutes, recalculated every 2,016 blocks and pushed up when they come faster than that. Blocks in this cycle averaged 9 minutes 26 seconds, by mempool.space's count. What that implies is reported five ways. cryptoticker, writing on 21 October, had the rise at 6.44% and the result at 149.6 trillion; Pickaxe three days later said about 5%. OneMiners on 26 October gave 6.1% and noted trackers spread between 4.8% and 6.4%. The Tokenist, publishing Wednesday, had about 6.3%, or 149.4 trillion, timed near 17:00 UTC. The live endpoint read 5.976% on Thursday afternoon. No account seen here prints more than one of those figures, and this desk did not average them.

Two accounts already called it a record

COINTURK and Tangem both published on 22 October describing 140.58 trillion as the highest difficulty the network has recorded. The primary series says something else. blockchain.com's two-year difficulty chart, read on Thursday, peaks at 155.97 trillion in late October 2025, and the Tokenist puts the record at that same figure on 29 October 2025. On those numbers the present level is 9.9% short of the peak, close to the "about 10%" Pickaxe used on 24 October. The two sets of accounts do not reconcile, and we could not establish how the 22 October figure was reached. Even after Thursday's rise, difficulty would sit under the 2025 high.

The hashrate numbers depend on who is counting

Readings land in a band and arrive by different methods. mempool.space's live figure was 1,076 EH/s on Thursday. The Tokenist's seven-day average to Wednesday was 1,074 EH/s, which it placed about 6.8% under the record of 1,153 EH/s set on 19 October 2025, while the Luxor Hashrate Index showed 1,080 EH/s on 25 October. CryptoQuant's measure, carried by two outlets on 22 October, read 1,000 EH/s flat. The direction is the same in all of them. Computing power bottomed at 826 EH/s on 31 January, averaged near 900 EH/s in July and crossed 1,000 again on 11 October for the first time since 1 June, on the Tokenist's figures. That recovery followed the stretch when hashrate fell more than 20% as miners turned to AI work.

Where the squeeze lands

Hashprice is what a miner earns per unit of computing power each day, and it is the line that moves when difficulty climbs without the price following. The Tokenist put it at $36.12 per petahash over the week to Wednesday, against about $47 a year earlier, a fall of 23%. Its estimate after the retarget is near $34 if bitcoin holds. OneMiners, working from $35.95 on 26 October, got $33.87. Both sit above Luxor's June low of $30.37. Two accounts give break-even electricity costs and they are not the same: Pickaxe near $0.11 per kilowatt-hour, COINTURK at $0.08 to $0.10 for machines in the 9 to 12 joules-per-terahash range. Neither confirms the other. The 16 October retarget added 5.92%, and this one is larger.

What the adjustment settles is arithmetic, not whether the machines stay on. The next one falls two weeks later. If hashrate holds at the higher setting, hashprice goes lower again with no move in the price. Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool mined 64% of last week's blocks on the Tokenist's count, so a short list of operators carries most of that exposure. Fee income is thin: 2.10 of the 452.1 bitcoin from the last 144 blocks, or 0.46%.