Bitcoin: Bitcoin Miner Difficulty

What Is This Chart Showing?

This Bitcoin live chart shows the increases and decreases in mining difficulty over time for bitcoin miners as they try to mine for new blocks.

Bitcoin difficulty is a statistical measurement that identifies how many hashes need to be generated to find a valid solution to solve the next Bitcoin block. Miners that are able to find the solution earn the mining reward.

Change in Bitcoin Mining Difficulty

The algorithm in the source code of Bitcoin is what actually controls the pace of change for mining difficulty, as there is no centralized owner of Bitcoin. Its calculations for difficulty change are dependent on the amount of competition in the network mining for new blocks.

The changes in mining difficulty ensure that new blocks are generally discovered steadily over time, approximately once every 10 minutes.

This steady mining of blocks ensures that the amount of bitcoin entering the network through mining is consistent over time, meaning that its inflation rate can be easily forecasted. To many, this is very appealing when compared to fiat currencies that can have their rate of supply manually adjusted by centralized entities.