Bitcoin network difficulty falls 4.3% to 29.897T, biggest drop in 10 months

The Bitcoin network witnessed a historic event on May 12 when the network difficulty attained its all-time high of 31.251 trillion as miners mined nearly 50,000 BTC of the remaining 2 million tokens.

While the Bitcoin community rejoiced the added resilience to the network owing to the rising difficulty in mining a Bitcoin block, the network difficulty recorded a drop of 4.33% — falling from 31.251 trillion to 29.897 trillion on May 26.

As Cointelegraph reported on several occasions, Bitcoin’s network difficulty consistently achieved all-time highs over the past ten months as it recovered from a massive drop of 45.4% — from 25.046 trillion on May 29, 2021, to 13.673 trillion on July 22, 2021.

Ever since then, Bitcoin’s network difficulty witnessed a total growth of 128.56% as it surged to its all-time high. However, despite the momentary decline of over 4%, the BTC ecosystem is still guarded by the most secure blockchain network.

Higher network difficulty demands higher computational power to validate and confirm transactions over the BTC blockchain. As a result, this prevents bad actors from taking over the network by contributing to over 50% of the hash rate and carrying out double-spending attacks.

Related: Falling Bitcoin price doesn't affect El Salvador: 'Now it's time to buy more,' reveals Deputy Dania Gonzalez

Cointelegraph recently interviewed Dania Gonzalez, Deputy of the Republic of El Salvador, to better understand the social impact of adopting BTC as legal tender.

According to Gonzalez, El Salvador made profits via strategic BTC investments and repurposed the fresh funds to build infrastructures like a veterinary hospital and a public school.

"What Nayib Bukele did was buy Bitcoins and make a profit at a certain strategic moment,” she said.

The Bitcoin (BTC) network broke its 10-month-long streak as the network difficulty recorded a drop of 4.33%, standing at 29.897 trillion at the time of writing.