Understanding Mining Difficulty & the Difficulty Increase in Mining Bitcoin
In a nutshell, mining difficulty is a random number that determines how hard the cryptographers or computers must work to create a new block. Now let’s break this down. As the number of aspiring miners, cryptographers, and computers increases, the difficulty of mining new blocks decreases, ergo it is necessary to increase this difficulty so that these entities take longer to mine each block. Adjusted every 2016th block, the difficulty is increased or decreased to ensure fairness in mining between man & machine, and to mitigate fraudulent mining of blocks. Mining 2016 blocks must take around 2 weeks on an average and if more blocks are created in this time period, the system automatically increases the difficulty, and if fewer blocks are created in the 2 weeks, the difficulty is decreased. The latter doesn’t occur as often, as more people and powerful computers are introduced to mine new blocks eventually. Another nuance that determines mining difficulty is the time taken to mine a ...
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