Glossary · Mining Basics
Block time
Also: block interval
Block time is the interval between consecutive Bitcoin blocks, which the difficulty adjustment targets at ten minutes on average, or about 144 blocks a day, although individual intervals vary widely.
Related terms
- Difficulty adjustment
- The difficulty adjustment is Bitcoin's recalculation of network difficulty every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, raising it when the previous blocks arrived faster than ten minutes apart and lowering it when they arrived slower, capped at a factor of four in either direction.
- Network difficulty
- Network difficulty is the number that sets how hard it is to find a valid Bitcoin block, adjusted every 2,016 blocks so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes as total hashrate changes.
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