Adjusting the difficulties after halving Bitcoin is associated with high transaction fees

One of the first episodes of the third halving In Bitcoin’s history, which took place just over a week ago, was the reduction of Hash rateor accumulated processing power of miners in the network. With this reduction, the network is overloaded and this is currently clearly reflected in transaction fees that have not been seen in almost a year.

The coin metrics data shows the average transaction fees over the equivalent of $ 2.5 since last May 12th, Date of reduction of mining premiums. During this period, in the past few days, on this Monday, the 18th, there was an average high of nearly $ 6, reflecting the same graph from Coin Metrics.

The same source shows that this average last exceeded the $ 2 equivalent it was the beginning of July 2019. And the highs of that Monday haven’t been seen since the last week of June of the same year. On the 27th of this month in particular, commissions averaged $ 6.1.

At the time of writing this note The average commission for a transaction to enter the next block is 51,300 Satoshisaccording to bitcoinfees.earn.com. This is approximately $ 4.9 at BTC’s current price.

After this halvingthe production of mining machines with low profitability or that would remain without profit caused the hash rate to drop by over 16%as reported by CryptoNews on May 14, two days after the event.

Previously, network processing performance had previously reached record levels halving. The latest Coin Metrics record shows slightly more than 80 EH / s until May 17th. Although the processing performance measurements are inaccurate in the short term, various sources consulted show values ​​that are far from the 137 EH / s of the historical maximum.

Less difficulty: decongesting the emerging network?

There has been a decrease in the new Bitcoin mining difficulty update that matches the lowest cumulative processing capacity of the network.

The deviation compared to the previous period is 6%, How has confirmed Alejandro de la Torre, Vice President of Poolin, one of the best known mining groups in the Bitcoin area. The difficulty increased from 16.1 T to 15.4 T.

Reducing the difficulty should reduce commissionsCurrently high due to network congestion. In theory, miners who are currently working on the network could mine blocks more quickly and start transactions in them with less difficulty.

More than 53,000 transactions are currently awaiting confirmation in the Bitcoin network. According to mempool.space, the commissions of the last blocks are still over 100 sat / byte.