As the bitcoin price has risen out of the $200’s over the past month, the price increase has driven another important event: more mining hardware is being brought online.Miners earn revenue two ways.The first is with the block reward, which is 25BTC approximately every 10 minutes.The other way is with transaction fees.The block reward also acts as the mechanism in which new supply of bitcoin is generated.Because mining tends to reward those that can do the most work, miners deploy increasing amounts of hardware to try to be the first to mine each block.To keep a steady block creation rate, Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto put in place a rule that updates the network difficulty every 2016 blocks, or approximately two weeks.According to Bitcoin Wisdom, the difficulty increase that took place today rose by 10.44%.The last time the difficulty increased by more than 10 percent was on November 5, 2014, when the difficulty increased by 10.05 percent.Further, Bitcoin Wisdom is predicting that the next bitcoin difficulty increase in 2 weeks will be 10.25%.

The last time there were two double digit percentage increases in difficulty was August 19, 2014 and August 31, 2014.But the increase in difficulty makes sense.The next generation of bitcoin miners have been released by three of the top companies in the space.In August, Bitmain announced the launch of the Antminer S7, which contains the BM1385 ASIC.Each S7 can generate upwards of 4,850 GH/s while only using 0.25 J/GH of power.In October, the Chinese mining firm BW announced that it was releasing its next stage bitcoin miner, which would contain a 14nm chip.Virgilio Lizardo Jr., head of international at Bitbank, told Bitcoin Magazine that the first batch of servers released would be 48 petahash total.For context, the current network has a hash rate of 550.5 PH/s.Finally, the original creator of the ASIC miner, Avalon, announced that it was releasing its latest miner, the Avalon6, which would contain the new A3218 mining chip.Each miner would be able to generate 3.65 TH/s of hashing power.

While these new miners have just hit the market, it is additional hardware that should come online over the coming weeks.The reality is simple: As the price of bitcoin increases, the number of people who can make a profit mining increases.That encourages more participation in securing the network, which results in the need for a difficulty increase.comprar bitcoin en efectivoAs these next generation of bitcoin miners come online, it is expected that the difficulty will continue to counteract the additional hash rate in the network.buy bitcoin quoraJacob Donnelly is a freelance journalist and a consultant in the bitcoin/blockchain space.jasa bitcoinHe runs a weekly digital currency and blockchain newsletter called Crypto Brief.bajada del bitcoin

NewsBitcoin Difficulty Rises 20%; Highest Increase Since August 2014 Bitcoin difficulty has increased 20.06% in the latest adjustment, reaching an exahash per second (an exahash is 10^18 hashes per second, or a billion gigahashes per second, GH/s).The latest difficulty value is 1,031,625,717 GH/s or about 1.03 EH/s, according to Bitcoin Wisdom which tracks the difficulty and hashrate of the Bitcoin network.bitcoin as money boston fedFor comparison, Litecoin’s last difficulty increase a few hours before Bitcoin’s was 1.78%.bitcoin rhode islandBitcoin’s difficulty grew at a compounded monthly growth rate of 8.13% per month in 2015.The increase is significant considering the block reward halving schedule that is expected later this year, which would halve the mining reward for finding a block from 25 BTC/block to 12.5 BTC/block.

Any new mining equipment will have a significantly higher return on investment before the block reward halving than just after, although the network is expected to adjust in difficulty if it is no longer profitable to mine.The reward halving is expected in July of 2016, according to Bitcoin Clock.According to data from Bitcoinity, antpool and f2pool control around 45% of the entire hashrate of the Bitcoin network.It is hard to pin-point where the increase is coming from but the increase seems to be coming from the Chinese miners.Such a rapid increase in the months leading up to the reward-halving event might make block times less than 10 minutes, accelerating the halving event.An hour before the current difficulty increase, the block confirmation time was 7.13 minutes, according to ZeroBlock.A 20% increase in block difficulty is rare even for the Bitcoin network that has seen a steady increase in difficulty over the months even as the price has continued to hold steady.The last time there was a 20%+ increase in difficulty was back in August 2014 when the network difficulty rose to 170,686,797 GH/s from 141,230,307 GH/s for an increase of 20.86%.

See also: target Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target.The Bitcoin network has a global block difficulty.Valid blocks must have a hash below this target.Mining pools also have a pool-specific share difficulty setting a lower limit for shares.difficulty = difficulty_1_target / current_target (target is a 256 bit number) difficulty_1_target can be different for various ways to measure difficulty.Traditionally, it represents a hash where the leading 32 bits are zero and the rest are one (this is known as "pool difficulty" or "pdiff").The Bitcoin protocol represents targets as a custom floating point type with limited precision; as a result, Bitcoin clients often approximate difficulty based on this (this is known as "bdiff").Each block stores a packed representation (called "Bits") for its actual hexadecimal target.The target can be derived from it via a predefined formula.

For example, if the packed target in the block is 0x1b0404cb, the hexadecimal target is Note that the 0x0404cb value is a signed value in this format.The largest legal value for this field is 0x7fffff.To make a larger value you must shift it down one full byte.Also 0x008000 is the smallest positive valid value.The highest possible target (difficulty 1) is defined as 0x1d00ffff, which gives us a hex target of It should be noted that pooled mining often uses non-truncated targets, which puts "pool difficulty 1" at So the difficulty at 0x1b0404cb is therefore: And: Here's a fast way to calculate bitcoin difficulty.It uses a modified Taylor series for the logarithm (you can see tutorials on flipcode and wikipedia) and relies on logs to transform the difficulty calculation: To see the math to go from the normal difficulty calculations (which require large big ints bigger than the space in any normal integer) to the calculation above, here's some python: Current difficulty, as output by Bitcoin's getDifficulty.

Graphs There is no minimum target.The maximum difficulty is roughly: maximum_target / 1 (since 0 would result in infinity), which is a ridiculously huge number (about 2^224).The actual maximum difficulty is when current_target=0, but we would not be able to calculate the difficulty if that happened.(fortunately it never will, so we're ok.)See discussion in target.The minimum difficulty, when the target is at the maximum allowed value, is 1.The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks.At the desired rate of one block each 10 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly two weeks to find.If the previous 2016 blocks took more than two weeks to find, the difficulty is reduced.If they took less than two weeks, the difficulty is increased.The change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under two weeks the previous 2016 blocks took to find.To find a block, the hash must be less than the target.The hash is effectively a random number between 0 and 2**256-1.

The offset for difficulty 1 is and for difficulty D is The expected number of hashes we need to calculate to find a block with difficulty D is therefore or just The difficulty is set such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been found at the rate of one every 10 minutes, so we were calculating (D * 2**48 / 0xffff) hashes in 600 seconds.That means the hash rate of the network was over the previous 2016 blocks.Can be further simplified to without much loss of accuracy.At difficulty 1, that is around 7 Mhashes per second.At the time of writing, the difficulty is 22012.4941572, which means that over the previous set of 2016 blocks found the average network hash rate was (The eternal question.)The average time to find a block can be approximated by calculating: where difficulty is the current difficulty, hashrate is the number of hashes your miner calculates per second, and time is the average in seconds between the blocks you find.For example, using Python we calculate the average time to generate a block using a 1Ghash/s mining rig when the difficulty is 20000: and find that it takes just under 24 hours on average.