According to PANews, Bitcoin's hash rate is expected to reach 1 Zettahash per second (ZH/s) before the next halving event in about 3.5 years, which puts pressure on miners to find cheap electricity and more efficient equipment.
Even if the hash rate grows at 20% per year, the average hash rate could reach 1,000 EH/s by 2027. Since 2020, the hash rate has increased by an average of 65% per year, and the current seven-day moving average is about 787 EH/s.
Miners need to find more creative ways to maintain operations. The hash rate of a single block may have reached 1 ZH/s, but due to the probabilistic nature and network fluctuations, the reading of a single block is not accurate, and the industry standard is a seven-day moving average.
Not only has the hash rate increased, but the mining difficulty has also increased. Since October, the blockchain has had seven consecutive positive difficulty adjustments, and the difficulty is currently 109.78 T, which is adjusted every 2016 blocks to keep mining a block in about 10 minutes.