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 single block. The responsibility of the difficulty adjustment system is to make sure that regardless of the number of cryptographers or the power of the computer, mining each block takes 10 minutes exactly. This is precisely the reason why mining bitcoin blockchains are no more profitable for individual cryptographers as the margin of profit is minuscule.

A smooth segway to the second question, BTC difficulty is increasing gradually because it has escaped the cusps of an average miner, and is ironically centralised today. As more companies undertake the task of mining bitcoin blockchains and ensure to carefully traverse around the ‘difficulty’ concept, the average miner has no chance of competing with the state of the art computers built in Greenland. It is one thing to deal with individual miners but when one bitcoin blockchain mining company locks horns with another, the difficulty is bound to increase.

We’re all aware of the mindblowing breakthrough achieved by Google in 2019 when it confirmed attaining quantum supremacy. A remarkable milestone which paves the way for the invention of cures for terminal diseases are on the horizon also means that cryptography, mining blockchains, encrypting the blockchains would have to the reimagined all over again. A good problem that begs to be solved in the years to come, quantum processors, coupled with simple machine learning can solve our problems even before we foresee them.