Mining · Oct 17, 2026

XBT difficulty jumps 17%, cutting mining income per terahash about 14%

By xbt.live · 3 minute read

XBT mining difficulty rose 16.9% at block 977,760 this afternoon, the third straight increase. At today's price of about $639, that cuts mining income per terahash by about 14%, from roughly $7.84 to $6.71 a day.

Step chart of XBT difficulty on a log scale since Sept 1: three 4x jumps in early September, a 3x jump on Sept 12, then +35%, +10% and +17%

The numbers

	Before	After
Difficulty change	+16.9% at block 977,760 (Oct 17, 3:43pm ET)
Average block time	8m 23s	about 9m 48s at today's hash rate
Hash rate	about 43 PH/s
Hash price at $639	~$7.84 per TH per day	~$6.71 per TH per day

Blocks were coming every 8 minutes 23 seconds because hash rate kept climbing. The adjustment resets that toward 10 minutes, so each terahash now finds fewer blocks a day for the same 3.125 XBT reward.

Seven weeks of difficulty

Early September: three 4x jumps in a week (Sept 2, 4 and 8) as miners piled in once trading opened.
Sept 12: nearly 3x.
Since then: +35% (Sept 23), +10% (Oct 5) and now +17%.

Difficulty is up about 74% since Sept 12 and more than 80x since trading opened. The jumps are getting smaller, but they keep coming: hash rate is still growing while price has fallen from its Oct 8 high.

What it means for miners

Hash price is falling from both sides: more competition and a lower price. On Oct 15, at $706 and the old difficulty, a terahash earned about $8.91 a day. Today it's about $6.71, down about a quarter in two days. Machines with higher power costs get squeezed first. Check your own numbers on our profitability page, which updates with live difficulty and price.

The next one lands right before the unlock

The next adjustment is at block 979,776, early estimate about +5%, expected around Oct 30 to 31. That's just 144 blocks, roughly a day, before block 979,920, when about 20,250 XBT of locked mining rewards becomes spendable. Lock Pressure chart

Difficulty chart Hash price chart

Sources: mempool.guide difficulty data and xbt.live price and hash rate, Oct 17, 2026 at block 977,806. Hash price is estimated from network hash rate, the 3.125 XBT subsidy and today's price, and excludes fees, which are under 0.1% of miner income. Not financial advice.

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Life support

So the patient was moved to the emergency room. In August, the SHA-256 miners left on their own chain, and the nodes enforcing BIP-110's rules kept going without them. At the end of the month, the rule-keeping chain switched its mining to BLAKE2b so the captured SHA-256 hash couldn't take it over. That chain is XBT. The full story is in How Bitcoin kept its rules and moved to BLAKE2b.

Patients on life support don't look healthy, and XBT doesn't either. About 102 XBT buy one BTC. It has had three bear markets in six weeks. That's what a rescue looks like from the outside. The people in the ER right now, the node runners, the miners, the builders shipping wallets and pools every week, are doing the work while the outcome is anything but certain. If the patient makes it, they're the ones who saved it.

The strangest part: you already own it

If you held bitcoin before Aug 8, 2026, you hold XBT. Same coins, same addresses, same keys. The proof of work that secured your coins for 17 years secures them on both chains, because the history is identical up to block 961,631. Every UTXO that existed before the split exists on XBT. The XBT you hold cost you exactly what your BTC cost you.

Since the split, the two histories have gone different ways. XBT's blocks follow BIP-110's rules: less data that isn't money, a cleaner chain going forward. Not sure what you hold? Check an address.

Two places at once

The body is still on the old chain: the brand, the network effect, the exchange listings, the ticker everyone knows. That doesn't disappear overnight, and we won't pretend it does.

But the thing that made Bitcoin worth caring about was never the brand. It was the idea: money that no state, no company and no small group of operators can change on users without their consent. That idea now lives on the chain whose users enforced their rules when it mattered. The body stayed. The soul moved.

Bitcoin was always a quiet way to separate money from the state. It still is. It just lives somewhere new.

Opinion. Not financial advice. XBT trades on thin markets and can lose most of its value quickly. Price figures as of the evening of Oct 10, 2026 (US Eastern).