BITCOIN MINING DIFFICULTY DROPS FOR A SECOND TIME IN MARCH.

The difficulty of mining a bitcoin (BTC) block dropped 0.35% on Thursday, the second time this month, after a consistent climb since November. On March 3, mining difficulty dropped 1.5%, data from information platform Glassnode shows. The difficulty adjusts automatically relative to the computing power on the network, also known as the hashrate, to keep the time between each mined block relatively stable at 10 minutes.

The bitcoin mining hashrate has dropped from an all-time high in February of 248 exahash/second (EH/s) to 216 EH/s on March 17, according to Glassnode data.

"This slight drop is likely due to unprofitable miners unplugging ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). As energy prices increase globally, we will likely see more ASICs fall off the network," Compass Mining founder and CEO Whitt Gibbs said. Electricity prices are soaring across the world as one of the world's largest exporters of fossil fuels, Russia, is enthralled in a war with Ukraine, and global energy supply chains are being severed by sanctions.