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Difficulty

Bitcoin Hashrate, Mining Difficulty Soar While Fees Sink: BlocksBridge

by admin August 19, 2025

In brief

Bitcoin network mining difficulty hit an all-time high of 129 trillion, making it harder than ever for miners to earn rewards despite Bitcoin’s recent price pullback.
Miner revenues are being squeezed as hashprice dropped to $60 per petahash and transaction fees fell below 1% of block rewards for the first time ever.
New tariffs up to 57.6% on mining equipment imports are creating additional financial pressure, with CleanSpark facing a potential $185M liability and Iris Energy $100M.

Even as Bitcoin cools off from its new all-time high, activity on the network has surged, pushing mining difficulty to fresh highs.

The Bitcoin network difficulty now stands at a record high of 129 trillion. That’s a 6.4% increase over the past 90 days, according to CoinWarz.

The difficulty was nearly this high in early June, when it inched past 126 trillion for the first time ever. The higher the difficulty the harder it becomes for miners to successfully add new blocks and earn rewards.

There may be some relief coming. The difficulty, which adjusts automatically roughly every two weeks, is set to lower 0.33% on Friday, August 22.

But for now, the all-time high difficulty is showing up in lower Bitcoin miner revenues, writes BlocksBridge Consulting founder and partner Nishant Sharma in his latest Bitcoin mining newsletter.

He wrote that the hashprice, or the amount of revenue earned per unit of computing power, has sunk to $60 per petahash per second. “This reflects ongoing compression in miner margins, as difficulty growth continues to offset gains from price appreciation,” Sharma added.

Meanwhile, transaction fees have slipped below 1% of block rewards for the first time ever. The revenue earned by miners comes from the static block reward, which is currently 3.125 BTC per block mined, and transaction fees paid by users.

“In July, fees accounted for just 0.985% of total monthly block rewards–the first time this share has fallen below 1%,” Sharma wrote.

The overall picture for Bitcoin miners hasn’t been helped by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has implemented punishing tariffs on imports from many of the countries that sell Bitcoin mining rigs. Imports from China are now subject to 57.6% tariffs, while Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are all subject to 21.6% tariffs.

The tariffs have already negatively affected two U.S. miners. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees tariff enforcement, has sent invoices to Iris Energy and CleanSpark—but for mining rigs that were imported in 2024.

“CleanSpark warned that if CBP’s position were upheld, its potential tariff liability could reach $185 million,” Sharma said. “IREN has also faced a $100 million dispute with CBP under similar circumstances. Both companies are challenging CBP’s claims.”

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August 19, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ latest update brings in a nightmare difficulty mode and another weird collab

by admin June 25, 2025

Another month, another Assassin’s Creed Shadows update, again one that comes with a list of quality of life changes, but also one that comes with another surprising collaboration. Let’s start with that one, which is, weirdly, a new story pack made in collaboration with Critical Role, the wildly popular actual play series. For some context, Critical Role did an official Assassin’s Creed themed oneshot a little while back. In said oneshot, Hi-Fi Rush’s Robbie Daymond played a character called Rufino, who’s being added into the game through this new mission in update 1.0.6.

“Rufino, an old friend of Tomiko and Heiji, calls in a life debt after uncovering a deadly conspiracy,” Ubisoft explains. “While working as a translator, he discovered evidence that a secretive organization has been hiring assassins to eliminate influential commoners. Now, he turns to Naoe and Yasuke for help in stopping these killers.” Completing this quest nets you Rufino as a new ally, and you’ll get the Critical Role logo as a banner.

Right, now the regular update stuff. A new nightmare difficult setting is now available with this update, which does a few different things. Defensive options are less effective in this mode, and you need to pull off perfect parries for them to deflect the hit fully. Enemy AI is “smarter, faster, and more aggressive in a variety of circumstances, including detection.” And combat resources are harder to find too.

For those of you oddly desperate to wear your headgear during cutscenes, that’ll be an option now too, and there’s toggles for specific types of VFX that you can turn off and on as well. The regional alert system available in castles has been expanded to the whole province on top of that, meaning that when you repeatedly attack “Civilians or Military units outside Castles, the alarm can be triggered, and a group of Guardians will hunt you in the world.” There’s also three different camera presets when on a horse, for your riding pleasure.

Lastly, for us here in PC land, there’s an Ultra Low visual quality level – you can read about the exact specs that’s catered to over on the post about the update, alongside the list of fixes and tweaks that you mostly don’t need to worry about.

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June 25, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

You can now search for Steam games by adjustable difficulty, mouse-only options and other accessibility tags

by admin June 15, 2025

As promised earlier this year, Valve have given Steam developers the power to tag their games as having certain accessibility features, including narrated game menus, ways of differentiating visual elements that don’t rely on colour, and touch-only interaction. You’ll now be able to search for games with these tags, and view the full list of accessibility features on each game’s Steam page.

The update is based on feedback from developers as well as players with disabilities, according to Valve. Participating devs can make use of the system by means of a software wizard – ah, I find it vaguely comforting that people still call this kind of program a “wizard” – which walks them through each accessibility category. Valve say that “over 5000 applications” have already made use of the new tags.

“It’s not required, but highly recommended because of how much easier it will be for players with accessibility needs to find these games,” they note in a blog post. “We’ve worked to make it as easy as possible for developers to indicate these features are available by using feedback to standardize these options as much as possible.”

The new accessibility tags are broadly divided into “visual”, “audio”, “gameplay” and “input”. The “gameplay” bracket includes “adjustable difficulty” and “save anytime”, while under “visual” we find options like “camera comfort”, which lets players “adjust or disable uncomfortable camera movement such as screen shaking, camera bob, or motion blur”.

You can read a full breakdown on Steamworks, including Valve’s notes on why each option is important to players.

The selection of taggable features could probably do with some expansion, and the FAQ descriptions themselves are rather brief and broad. When the accessibility tags were announced in April, accessibility-focussed website Can I Play That suggested that Valve should base their system on the existing Accessible Games Initiative, which aims to standardise accessibility tagging across every game store, to avoid confusing players.

“According to the list in the documentation there is a lot of overlap, and it’s mostly Steam that is missing a few tags,” Can I Play That wrote. “Steam’s version also uses some different names and descriptions. Perhaps most importantly, there also seem to be differences in the criteria.”

Still, I’m glad to see this kind of thing from Valve. There’s certainly a business case for it, inasmuch as options for players with impaired vision need to be justified in terms of the balance sheet. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.3 billion people worldwide “experience a significant disability”. Back in 2023, our James wrote a feature on custom and adaptive controllers in particular, discussing how corporate profit motives inevitably limit the options, together with the lingering problem of ableist players perceiving accessibility features as ‘cheating’.

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June 15, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Despite its new easy mode, Lies of P will get a ‘difficulty reduction’ in a future update because too many players are getting wrecked by the DLC

by admin June 10, 2025

The Pinocchio soulslike Lies of P got an easy mode alongside the release of Overture DLC last week, an entirely uncontroversial move that riled up absolutely no one. But the DLC also apparently introduced a major difficulty spike in the Legendary Stalker mode—previously the game’s default—and it’s bad enough that game director Ji Won Choi says developer Neowiz is going to make some adjustments.

Soulslikes are supposed to be tough, yes, but as you can see in this newly formed megathread on the Lies of P subreddit (via Kotaku), Lies of P felt a little too tough for quite a few players following the launch of Overture. The problem seems particularly bad in NG+ modes. Naturally, there are a few who proclaim the game is actually very easy—there always is—but the bulk of posts seem to feel that the DLC has thrown things out of whack.

“The base game was basically pitch perfect. There were a few stupid things, but nothing was super egregious,” redditor Lord_Nightraven wrote. “DLC? The devs overdid things. And it shows. The stat numbers alone feel like NG+1 end game/early NG+2. That’s on NG+0. That’s a massive spike all things considered on intended difficulty, aka Legendary Stalker.”

“I’m NG+1 getting two-shot by everything even on easiest difficulty and I’m stuck on the predator boss,” tylxr567 complained. “I’m bad but seriously I can complete the main game on hardest difficulty just fine, this DLC is crazy.”

RJE808 was somewhat more to the point about it: “Markiona is about to make me drop this shit. Holy fuck.”

Well, good news, Overture-sufferers: Your plaintive wailing has been heard.

“We want to thank you for all the feedback and suggestions our community has sent us since the launch,” Choi said in a video posted today. “We’re reviewing all of it carefully and are already looking into when to implement some of your suggestions.

“Among all the feedback, we are paying the closest attention to the combat experience. We identified areas that did not turn out quite as we intended. Therefore, we are reviewing various adjustments, including difficulty reduction.”

Lies of P: Director’s Letter – YouTube

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Don’t expect Neowiz to start waving the nerfhammer around immediately, though. “Combat is one of the most fundamental experiences in Lies of P, so any modifications or changes require meticulous work and thorough testing,” Choi said. Developers are still digging into what exactly needs to be done, but Choi added that he wanted to put the word out now so fans know “why it’s taking our team some time, and the general direction we’re heading.”

It says something, I think, that the reaction to the announcement of the difficulty reduction seems mostly welcoming. Again, the git gud crowd is there to say it’s not actually hard at all, but the broader feeling is that the DLC introduced serious issues with difficulty scaling. The adjustment, whenever it happens, will no doubt lead to a fresh round of “I beat it pre-patch” jokes, but if it also means the majority of players can properly enjoy it again, I’d call that a fair trade.

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June 10, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Lies of P: Overture will have difficulty reduced in future update

by admin June 10, 2025

Lies of P is set to receive further updates, including “difficulty reduction”, following the release of its Overture DLC.

In a video from director Jiwon Choi, he stated the development team is grateful for feedback and suggestions from players since the DLC was shadow-dropped last week at Summer Game Fest.

“We’re reviewing all of it carefully and are already looking into when to implement some of your suggestions,” he said. “Among all the feedback, we are paying the closest attention to the combat experience.

Lies of P: Director’s LetterWatch on YouTube

“We identified areas that did not turn out quite as we intended,” he continued. “Therefore, we are reviewing various adjustments, including difficulty reduction.

“However, combat is one of the most fundamental experiences in Lies of P, so any modifications or changes require meticulous work and thorough testing.”

The details and date for the next patch are unknown, but the director is clearly keen to keep the game’s community up to date with the development process. It follows a patch alongside the DLC that’s added plenty of quality of life changes to the base game.

Since the DLC’s release, players have criticised Overture for its high difficulty. In particular, on NG+ even regular enemies are proving challenging.

What has perhaps exacerbated this is that the DLC is only accessible once you reach chapter nine of the main game. It means that, if like me, you started a NG+ run after finishing the game, you’ll need to play through it again to reach the DLC. I suspect a lot of players are therefore attempting Overture for the first time on NG+ rather than starting the base game again, raising the difficulty level beyond what was intended for a first run.

While Overture is a paid expansion for Lies of P, the base game has received a free update adding new difficulty levels. The original difficulty is now normal, while two easier difficulty levels have been added.

This addition is somewhat controversial for soulslike games, which are known for their high challenge, but it’s also ensuring the game is more approachable for a wider audience. And, for me at least, it’s making racing through the base game to get to the DLC a lot quicker on easy mode!

Still, it’s clear that balancing the difficulty is proving a challenge for the developer with this additional expansion. But that’s something even FromSoftware struggled with when Elden Ring expansion Shadow of the Erdtree was released – it was criticised by some for being too difficult and was subsequently adjusted.

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June 10, 2025 0 comments