Glossary · Mining Basics
Network difficulty
Also: difficulty, mining 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.
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.
- 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.
- Block time
- 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.
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