According to latest reports, Ethereum mining is becoming increasingly difficult and on top of that the cryptocurrency has taken a massive hit making it sell for $200 US. In addition, miners are reporting a new difficulty spike. According to Tweaktown, the difficulty has increased massively during the past 72 hours. Since the night of July 2nd, the DAG increased jumping by 20% each time.


Several mining communities have reported a difficulty spike regarding Ethereum mining. According to the latest information, the increased difficulty is having an effect on the value of the coin as well. Right now reports are claiming that Ethereum is 20% harder to mine than what it used to be. Since the night of July 2nd, the DAG increased in waves from 900T to 1.2T.

A massive increase in difficulty usually means that a large mining farm or even several mining farms have gone online or some data center switched from mining other coins to Ethereum. Since the difficulty scales with the amount of resources (sheer number of cards) mining a certain coin this would be the logical conclusion.

While this bump in difficulty will not make Ether mining completely useless, it will make it harder for the small miners to reach their ROI (Return on Investment). The mining profitability depends directly on the difficulty. The hard mining a certain coin becomes the less coins you’ll have in your pocket by the end of the day, especially considering that you’ll have to pay more for electricity per coin mined.

The exact same thing could be witnessed a few years ago. Back then mining the so called Litecoin was very profitable. Once the masses figured that out it took a few months until the big guys in the business started mining that very same coin, making it less profitable for the home miners, since they simply can’t compete when it comes to electricity cost. The next step, in the case of all coins, are the “ASICs”, which are chips that are specifically designed to mine one particular coin as effectively as possible. As soon as some company comes up with the first ASIC for Ethereum home miners won’t be able to compete anymore.



Source: Reddit