Bitcoin Forum

The total hashrate for BTC has dropped 50%. Mining BCH has become more profitable. I see that major miners have reduced their mining effort and some, like BTC.TOP, have stopped completely mining BTC. As a result the average time between blocks has gone up to almost 20 minutes. It will take time for the difficulty to adjust for this and then it will be profitable for miners to start mining BTC again. The adjustment will take place after 1868 blocks and with the current creation rate that will take more than 20 days. I do expect that some big miners will switch back to BTC because it is in their interest to do so. Miners will want to keep BTC alive because they like it when they can switch between more than one blockchain and they also are probably still holding substantial amounts of BTC. Although it is more profitable now to mine BCH some major miners are still mining BTC. Bitmain (Antpool and BTC.COM) is still mining BTC and BTCC who did stop for a few days has switched back to mining BTC now (BTCC mined 9 blocks in the past 24 hours). Even Bitcoin.com, owned by Roger Ver, has mined two blocks in the past 8 hours!