Crypto Industry News:

In late January 2021, the online Bitcoin mining difficulty, a measure of how complicated block reward mining is, is higher than ever. Currently, the difficulty of mining BTC is as high as 20.8 trillion, but despite the handicap, miners still maintain a hot hashrate of the network.

The price of BTC was higher than ever before and despite a temporary drop below $ 30,000 on January 21, crypto assets managed to stay above that range. This has made many ASIC mining machines profitable at the current price, including legacy mining rigs.

Nevertheless, the current difficulty of Bitcoin mining is the highest ever experienced in the last 12 years of operation. Basically, the difficulty is how difficult it is for a miner to mine the BTC block or just find the hash below the specified target.

The higher the difficulty, the more complicated it is for all mining participants trying to find BTC blocks on a given day. At the time of writing the news, the data shows that the Bitcoin chain difficulty is around 20 823 531 150 111 or 20.82 T.

There are around 22 mining pools in the BTC chain that sacrifice SHA256 hashrate. Currently, these pools maintain Bitcoin hashrates above 150 exahashes per second (eH / s).

Over the past two months, the BTC hashrate has remained constant between 140 and 165 EH / s. At the current speeds, the difficulty seems to jump just a hair higher, at + 0.11% to 20.85 T in 12 days .

Currently, the top five BTC mining pools today include F2pool (23 EH / s), Poolin (19.2 EH / s), Binance Pool (17.1 EH / s), Btc.com (16.5 EH / s) and Antpool (12.4 EH / s). These five largest mining pools today handle 61.45% of the total SHA256 hashrate, while the 17 mining pools capture 38.55% of the remaining hashrate.

Technical Market Outlook:

The volatility of Bitcoin has decreased after the pair had made a Bearish Engulfing candlestick pattern around the level of $34,898. The bears has pushed the price towards the level of $31,000 again and it looks like they are getting ready for a breakout lower. The key short-term technical support is seen at the level of $29,000, so if it is clearly violated, then the market might extend the slide down towards the level of $27,000.

Weekly Pivot Points:

WR3 - $45,492

WR2 - $41,554

WR1 - $36,330

Weekly Pivot - $32,457

WS1 - $27,332

WS2 - $23,540

WS3 - $18,286

Trading Recommendations:

Despite the recent corrective cycle the bulls are still in control of the market. The up trend continues and the next long term target for Bitcoin is seen at the level of $50,000, so any correction or local pull-back should be used to open the buy orders. This scenario is valid as long as the level of $20,000 is clearly broken.