PRICE WENT UNDER THE COST TO MINE ON SEPTEMBER 15 — THE BLOCKS KEPT COMING 24 SECONDS FAST, SO THE RULE TURNED DIFFICULTY UP 4.16 PERCENT

Block 967,680 landed at 3:09 a.m. Eastern on September 19 by its own timestamp, and with it Bitcoin’s difficulty rose 4.16 percent, from 127.45 T to 132.76 T. Nobody voted. Nobody filed. The rule read two timestamps, block 965,664 on September 5 and block 967,679 on September 19, found 1,161,260 seconds where 1,209,600 were expected, and turned the dial up by that ratio. That is 576 seconds a block, 24 seconds fast, for two weeks straight. Difficulty is how hard the puzzle is that miners race to solve, and every 2,016 blocks the network resets it so the race takes about ten minutes again. Faster blocks mean more machines were running, not fewer. On September 15 the desk reported bitcoin trading under the $75,500 that CoinShares calls the weighted average ex-tax cash cost for listed miners, and CoinShares says at least 35 EH/s is scheduled to leave that group. Maybe it will. The chain does not read reports. It counted about 950 EH/s of work over this run of blocks, up from about 912 EH/s the run before, arithmetic anyone with a node can redo; mempool’s own hashrate meter reads about 946 EH/s. Mempool’s adjustment meter guessed plus 3.75 percent with 126 blocks to go; the last 125 came in at 541 seconds each and the real number printed higher. The cost figure is trusted. The timestamps are checked. {{PRICE_LINE}}