The bitcoin network has once again become more difficult to mine as competition among miners intensifies.  

CoinWarz, an on-chain analysis tool, said on February 18 that the difficulty of mining bitcoin reached a Trillion Trillion yuan ($27.97 Trillion), the second time in the past three weeks that bitcoin has set a new record in the difficulty of mining.  As of January 23, bitcoin was about 26.7t hard to mine, with an average computation power of 190.71EH/s per second. 

The difficulty of mining basically reflects the level of competition among miners, and the higher the difficulty, the more intense the competition.  As a result, miners have recently begun selling their holdings of coins or shares in their companies to make sure they have enough cash on hand.  Most notably, Bitcoin miner Marathon Digital Holdings filed to sell $750 million of its shares on Feb. 12.  

At the same time, according to Blockchain.com, bitcoin's total network computing power reached an all-time high of 211.9EH/s, up 45% in six months.  

Over the past four days ending Monday, AntPool was the pool with the highest computational contribution, with 96 bitcoin blocks, followed by F2Pool with 93 blocks.  

As Data from Blockchain.com shows, the difficulty of the Bitcoin network dropped between May and July last year, largely due to factors including China's total ban on cryptocurrency mining.  At that time, bitcoin's total network computing power was only 69EH/s, and mining difficulty was at a low of 13.6T.  

However, bitcoin's overall computing power and difficulty of mining has recovered significantly since August as expatriate miners have resumed operations in other countries