On-chain data shows Bitcoin just got harder to mine as the network Difficulty has witnessed an increase during the latest adjustment.

Bitcoin Difficulty Has Just Set A New All-Time High

According to data from CoinWarz, the Bitcoin Difficulty has gone up in the most recent adjustment. The “Difficulty” here refers to a feature on the BTC blockchain that controls how hard the miners would find it to mine blocks on the network right now. It’s measured in units of ‘hashes.’

The metric’s value changes about every two weeks during what is known as a network ‘adjustment.’ Just like with the other aspects of the BTC blockchain, no human has any control over adjustments; the code written by Satoshi automatically conducts these events.

As for why the pseudonymous creator added this feature into the cryptocurrency, the reason is so that the block time on the chain remains consistent at around 10 mins per block.

If the block time exceeds 10 mins, it means the miners are performing their task slower than usual. To correct this, the network drops the Difficulty in the next adjustment. Similarly, it ups the metric if miners are churning out blocks at a rate faster than 10 minutes for each.

The latest Bitcoin adjustment occurred during this past weekend. Below is a chart that shows how the Difficulty changed in this event.

Looks like the value of the metric has seen a sharp surge over the past couple of days | Source: CoinWarz

As is visible in the graph, the network has sharply risen its Difficulty during this adjustment. Prior to the event, the metric stood at 108.1 terahashes, but now it has jumped to 114.1 terahashes, a new all-time high (ATH).

This significant positive change of 5.6% means that the miners have been much faster during the last couple of weeks as compared to the two-week period before then.

The faster pace of the miners is a result of the aggressive expansion that they have recently participated in. Below is a chart f

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Author: Keshav Verma