It's a sign of the times: the next bitcoin mining difficulty update might be the largest drop this year.

On Dec. 2, the United States dollar index (DXY), an index that measures the dollar's strength against a basket of top foreign currencies, reached 104.40 which was the lowest level seen in 5 months. 

Veteran investor Mark Mobius believes there is a possibility of Bitcoin crashing to $10k next year.

While bitcoin prices have been lower than the estimated cost of bitcoin production, the network’s hashrate has dropped a great deal since mid-November. Presently, the total hashrate dedicated to the Bitcoin network is coasting along at 236 exahash per second (EH/s) after dropping below the 200 EH/s range six days ago.

The UTXO Realized Price Distribution (URPD), a metric for indicating the percentage of BTC supply across a specified market price, indicated 8% of the Bitcoin supply was bought between $15,500 and $17,000, according to data analyzed by CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin miners were one of those sections of the crypto community who were impacted massively by the crypto winter, thanks to the selling pressure. According to the founder of Capriole Fund, Charles Edwards, the increase in miners’ stress could also paint a negative outlook for the king coin in the long term.

420 Bitcoin tokens were just moved amid the struggling markets after being dormant for ten years.

On-chain data provided by Glassnode and analyzed by CryptoSlate showed an erratic history for fees earned by exchanges on Bitcoin transactions.

The director general and advisor of the ECB of the institution noted that banks risked incurring long-term reputational damages for promoting Bitcoin despite the short-term profits they could make. The bank warned that a further plunge by BTC would harm customer relations and trigger reputational damage to the entire industry.

The latest critique came from the top leadership at European Central Bank (ECB), who stated that Bitcoin’s value “is likely to be artificially induced” while adding that the crypto-asset is on a “road to irrelevance.”