The Block: It hasn't been this easy to mine bitcoin since January 2020

Bitcoin's mining difficulty has set yet another downward adjustment with a 4.81% decline over the weekend. It has now been revised to 13.67 trillion.

Network data shows that this is the lowest point in 18 months — since January 2020 — and that it's down 45% from its recent high of 25.05 trillion that held through the two weeks between May 13 and 30. It follows the largest ever network difficulty ease recorded on July 3, which saw a plunge of nearly 28%.

This also marks the fourth consecutive drop of bitcoin's mining difficulty since China's systematic crackdown on bitcoin miners that started in May 21. The last time when the network's mining difficulty recorded negative adjustments for more than four times in a row was in 2011.

As a result, for every terahashes per second (TH/s) of computing power that is running on the network, the 24-hour mining results in theory have jumped up to around 0.00000931 bitcoin.

That being said, the drop rate over the weekend has slowed down as the network's hash rate has stabilized over the past two weeks, showing signs that it's on a slow recovery, The Block's Data Dashboard shows.

Following China's crackdown orders, local miners have accelerated their migration process — that already started before the crackdown — to overseas regions like Russia, Kazakhstan and North America .