The complexity of Bitcoin mining jumped by 21.4% for the first time in two years

Users of the social network Reddit discuss the recent jump in complexity in the Bitcoin network. The last major change raised the complexity by 250 billion units, or by 21.4% from a value of 1,196,792,694,099 to 1,452,839,779 146. The last time such a major leap took place in 2015. In order for the reader to better understand the scale of this change, we recall that it took almost 7 years for the complexity to rise from 1 to 250 billion. The reason for such a drastic change could only be the introduction of new large-scale mining equipment in the last two or three weeks, and the consequence was a natural growth of the network hash from 8.56 to 10.4 E / s (ex-session per second).

If this equipment belongs to the same owner, it means that not only the other miners suffered (their share of production decreased), but also the decentralization of the entire Bitcoin network.
Many also noticed a significant difference in the distribution diagrams of the extracted blocks in the last 7 days and today (on October 29) on the coin.dance website. The share of AntPool in the last 24 hours increased by 51% - from 18.8% to 28.47%, and the BTC.top pool completely disappeared from the Bitcoin network, and the F2Pool capacity also dropped significantly.

However, the short-term redistribution says only that Antpool did not move its capacities to Bitcoin Cash, and BTC.TOP and F2Pool did it: after a record increase in complexity on Bitcoin, some of the miners habitually switched to the production of this altcoyin, whose hashed network grew overnight approximately from 1 to 4 exceshes - that is, 4 times! This means that the production of BCH was accelerated, and the recalculation of the problem will occur in about three days, after which the miners will return to Bitcoin, whose hashed network, on the contrary, collapsed to 7 E / s.
Longer-term diagrams do not show significant changes in the hash distribution, which means that even if new capacities are commissioned in the same data center (by the way, this requires a capacity of about 200 MW), then they are evenly distributed across different pools. For comparison, the Bitmain data center in China's Inner Mongolia, shown to journalists in August, contains 25,000 Antminer S9 devices! And even such an impressive "army of asikov" gives a hashtat of no more than 350 Px / s and consumes about 35 MW of power, that is, almost 5.5 times less than is required to ensure the last increase in complexity.
Of course, here it is possible to make more bold assumptions - from putting into operation the first batch of new generation generators of the Japanese holding GMO or another manufacturer leading secret developments, before testing on the mining of a quantum computer. However, all these hypotheses can not yet be verified.