Bitcoin (BTC) retraced 5% over the second week in December to $42,236 on Saturday, Dec. 16, from a 19-month high of $44,700 on Dec. 9. The decline in average crypto exchange spot prices for Bitcoin followed an astonishing 62% rally over two months from $27,162 on Oct. 16 to that key resistance around the $44,000 level.

U.S. banking giant J. P. Morgan warned that BTC was overbought in mid-November after Bitcoin price surpassed the $36,000 level. Blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant said this week that BTC corrected after climbing too fast but that the digital asset is still in a bull market, with the bears firmly in the past.

Here are eight signs that Bitcoin’s bull market isn’t over yet.

1. It Keeps Taking an Hour or More to Mine a Block

There are now so many miners plugged into the Bitcoin network to securely process transactions that the core protocol adjusted BTC’s difficulty target to an all-time high of nearly 68 T on Nov. 26.

Just two weeks earlier, on Nov. 7, with Bitcoin’s SHA-256 difficulty set to a then-record high of 62.46, something interesting happened. Bitcoin took 43 minutes to produce a new block.

This happens on average once every 34 days because the difficulty setting calibrates to target ten minutes between blocks as an average result of probabilistic processes.

But then something even more interesting happened…

Right after taking 43 minutes to produce block 815,689, the Bitcoin network took 66 minutes to produce the following one: 815,690. The network is now so thick with miners that the protocol is racing to keep up with all the hash power they’re adding to secure Bitcoin and keep new blocks running on time, around every ten minutes.

2. The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Wants a Bitcoin ETF

It’s a sure sign of the times BTC markets are living through that BlackRock, Inc., the w