What is the Bitcoin Mining Difficulty?

The Bitcoin mining difficulty exists to make sure that, on average, a new block of Bitcoin transactions is produced every ten minutes.

The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks to ensure this, meaning that the difficulty will go up or down depending on how long it takes for 2016 blocks to be mined.

If more blocks are mined in a shorter period of time, the difficulty will go up; if fewer blocks are mined in a given period of time, the difficulty will go down.

A higher difficulty means that it will take more work for miners to find a new block, and a lower difficulty means it will take less work. The difficulty is measured in how many „hashes„ (or „hash functions„) a miner can perform in a given period of time. A hash is a mathematical function that takes an input of any length and produces an output of a fixed length. The input to a hash function can be anything, and the output is usually referred to as a „hash value„ or „hash.“

A miner’s goal is to find a block that contains a valid hash of the previous block’s header. The header contains a bunch of other stuff, but the hash is what’s important for our purposes. A valid hash must meet certain criteria, and the criteria are different for each difficulty level. For example, let’s say the current difficulty is 10. This means that a valid hash must start with 10 zeroes. If a miner’s hash doesn‚t start with 10 zeroes, it’s not a valid hash and the miner will keep trying different inputs until he finds one that produces a valid hash. Once a miner finds a valid hash, he broadcasts it to the network and everyone else verifies that it is, in fact, a valid hash. If it is, the miner has found a new block, and everyone updates their blockchain to include the new block.