Glossary · Mining Basics
Difficulty adjustment
Also: retarget, difficulty retarget, epoch
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.
Related terms
- 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.
- Hashrate
- Hashrate is the number of hash attempts a miner or the whole network performs per second, quoted in terahashes (TH/s), petahashes (PH/s) or exahashes (EH/s), and it determines a miner's expected share of block rewards.
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