• Bitcoin difficulty has recently hit a new all-time high, rising by 4.68%.
• Difficulty is adjusted automatically within Bitcoin’s core code based on mining activity on the network.
• Higher difficulty means a more secure blockchain as it becomes more energy intensive to attempt to attack the network.
The Bitcoin network recently saw a huge surge in difficulty, a metric which is used to measure the difficulty of mining a new block. The difficulty level reached a new all-time high, increasing by 4.68%. This marks the second largest positive adjustment in the difficulty level in over a year.
The difficulty of mining a new block is adjusted automatically within Bitcoin’s core code based on the mining activity on the network. The difficulty adjusts relative to the miners‘ hashrate in order to keep the time to create a new block to a consistent 10 minutes. This means that should a ‘bad actor’ attempt to onboard miners onto the network to attack it, the difficulty would increase along with the hashrate. This in turn would mean that the attack would have no more than two weeks before the new miners would cause the network to adapt and reduce their impact and control of the network.
The rise in difficulty is a positive sign for the network as it means that the blockchain is becoming more secure. As the difficulty increases, it becomes harder to mine new blocks and also more energy intensive to attempt to attack the network. This increase in difficulty also means that the time to mine a new block becomes more reliable.
Overall, the recent rise in difficulty is good news for the Bitcoin network. It shows that the network is continuing to become more secure and reliable for miners. As the difficulty increases, miners can be assured that the blockchain will remain secure and that their chances of finding new blocks will remain consistent.