Difficulty: Bitcoin Difficulty: 711,697,198,174 Estimated Next Difficulty: Adjust time: Hashrate(?): 5,065,947,269 GH/s Block Generation Time(?): Updated: Chart Explained The difficulty.After 2016 blocks generated, Bitcoin will adjust difficulty to estimated difficulty in order to keep the block generation time at 600 seconds.Difficulty History Date Difficulty Change Hash Rate Jun 17 2017 711,697,198,174 5,094,526,985 GH/s Jun 04 2017 678,760,110,083 4,858,754,124 GH/s May 23 2017 595,921,917,085 4,265,775,241 GH/s May 10 2017 559,970,892,891 4,008,427,786 GH/s Apr 27 2017 521,974,519,554 3,736,439,151 GH/s Apr 13 2017 520,808,749,422 3,728,094,244 GH/s Mar 30 2017 499,635,929,817 3,576,533,297 GH/s Mar 17 2017 475,705,205,062 3,405,230,497 GH/s Mar 03 2017 460,769,358,091 3,298,315,540 GH/s Feb 18 2017 440,779,902,287 3,155,225,442 GH/s Feb 04 2017 422,170,566,884 3,022,014,630 GH/s Jan 22 2017 392,963,262,344 2,812,940,600 GH/s Jan 10 2017 336,899,932,796 2,411,623,656 GH/s Dec 28 2016 317,688,400,354 2,274,102,150 GH/s Dec 15 2016 310,153,855,703 2,220,167,778 GH/s Dec 02 2016 286,765,766,821 2,052,749,317 GH/s Nov 18 2016 281,800,917,193 2,017,209,539 GH/s Nov 05 2016 254,620,187,304 1,822,642,296 GH/s Oct 22 2016 253,618,246,641 1,815,470,125 GH/s Oct 08 2016 258,522,748,405 1,850,577,916 GH/s Sep 25 2016 241,227,200,230 1,726,771,560 GH/s Sep 12 2016 225,832,872,179 1,616,574,667 GH/s Aug 29 2016 220,755,908,330 1,580,232,344 GH/s Aug 15 2016 217,375,482,757 1,556,034,316 GH/s Aug 02 2016 201,893,210,853 1,445,207,896 GH/s Jul 18 2016 213,492,501,108 1,528,238,850 GH/s Jul 04 2016 213,398,925,331 1,527,569,009 GH/s Jun 21 2016 209,453,158,595 1,499,324,110 GH/s Jun 08 2016 196,061,423,940 1,403,462,340 GH/s May 24 2016 199,312,067,531 1,426,731,353 GH/s May 11 2016 194,254,820,283 1,390,530,167 GH/s Apr 28 2016 178,659,257,773 1,278,892,782 GH/s Apr 14 2016 178,678,307,672 1,279,029,147 GH/s Apr 01 2016 166,851,513,283 1,194,369,655 GH/s Mar 18 2016 165,496,835,118 1,184,672,491 GH/s Mar 04 2016 158,427,203,767 1,134,066,098 GH/s Feb 19 2016 163,491,654,909 1,170,318,852 GH/s Feb 07 2016 144,116,447,847 1,031,625,717 GH/s Jan 26 2016 120,033,340,651 859,232,121 GH/s Jan 13 2016 113,354,299,801 811,421,684 GH/s Dec 31 2015 103,880,340,815 743,604,444 GH/s Dec 18 2015 93,448,670,796 668,931,642 GH/s Dec 06 2015 79,102,380,900 566,236,898 GH/s Nov 24 2015 72,722,780,643 520,569,941 GH/s Nov 11 2015 65,848,255,180 471,360,171 GH/s Oct 29 2015 62,253,982,450 445,631,364 GH/s Oct 15 2015 60,883,825,480 435,823,399 GH/s Oct 01 2015 60,813,224,039 435,318,014 GH/s Sep 17 2015 59,335,351,234 424,738,988 GH/s

Bitcoin difficulty is an estimate about how difficult it is to mine (find) a new bitcoin block.Bitcoin mining has two main purposes.litecoin mining hireOne is adding transactions to the bitcoin block chain.bitcoin paper wallet printerThe other purpose is to create new bitcoins.ethereal portable appsThe total number of bitcoins that will ever be mined is limited to 21 million.bitcoin coinmarketcapMoreover, the bitcoin protocol determines a time horizon over which the bitcoins will be created.ethereum explorerThis is done to limit the supply of bitcoins.litecoin per dollar

A new block is mined every 10 minutes.The number of bitcoins in one block is currently BTC 25 and is halved every 210,000 blocks or approximately every four years.calle bitcoin madridIf everybody could easily mine new bitcoins, inflation would be the result.bitcoin hvBitcoin difficulty exists to ensure a limited bitcoin supply.ethereum viewerThis does not mean there could be no inflation for bitcoin.Activities like bitcoin lending can increase the bitcoin money supply.But the main underlying driver of money supply remains the monetary base which is represented by the number of mined bitcoins.Therefore bitcoin difficulty is important to maintain the bitcoin purchasing power.Bitcoin mining gets more difficult with an increasing computing power in the network.The protocol always makes sure the pre-defined trajectory of bitcoin creation is kept.

The computing power is measured in hashes per second.To understand what that means, the process of mining needs to be explained in further detail.When a computer mines bitcoins, it tries to calculate a hash which is the block's header.The hash starts with a certain number of zeros.The number of zeros is defined by the target.The target is a 256-bit number and is therefore extremely long.All bitcoin clients know the target.It gets more difficult to mine bitcoins, the more leading zeros the hash has got.At the same time the computer is more likely to find a block at a given bitcoin difficulty when it has more computing power.This makes it crucial to optimize mining hardware.At today's high bitcoin difficulty levels, almost all miners use so called ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits).These are more efficient in their energy consumption and have a higher chance to find a bitcoin block.Mining resembles a game where you roll a dice which returns a hash.If the hash starts with a number of zeros that is smaller or equal to the number of zeros as defined by the target, you have won a bitcoin block.

If the number of zeros is larger, you have to roll the dice again.The more dices are rolled at the same time, i.e.the more computers are mining, the higher is the probability to find a new block.The probability also increases if the computing power of a single machine is increased.It simply resembles throwing more dices at the same time.Since mining difficulty is really high today, single miners are very rare.Most individuals join their computing power in so called mining pools.To make sure that on average a new block is created every 10 minutes only, the target needs to be adjusted frequently.This is because every second new mining rigs can be added to the network.The bitcoin protocol determines the recalculation frequency of the target.This means the protocol also determines the bitcoin difficulty.A new recalculation takes place every time the number of 2,016 blocks have been mined.If the targetted interval of 10 minutes per block was realized, this takes two weeks.Every bitcoin client does the reacalculation on its own by simply comparing the actual time it took to mine 2,016 blocks with the two weeks it was supposed to take.

The target is modified by the percentage deviation from the targetted time.Two weeks are the equivalent of 336 hours.So if for instance 2,016 blocks were mined in 13 days instead of 14 days, this is a deviation of 7%.The concrete value for the bitcoin difficulty is derived from the target.This means that bitcoin difficulty can also go down should the mining of blocks take longer than 2 weeks.In December 2014 this actually happened for the first time.Bitcoin is live since January 2009, so it took quite a while.Since the bitcoin difficulty went down in 2014 for the first time, this didn't happen very often again.Most of the time a decline in bitcoin difficulty is driven by a decreasing bitcoin price.A lower price makes bitcoin mining less profitable.This causes miners to turn their machines off which decreases the hash rate.A lower hash rate means on average it takes longer to mine new bitcoin blocks, hence the bitcoin difficulty needs to decrease.The formula to calculate the amount of time it takes on average to win a block is We can solve this equation for the bitcoin difficulty, it returns We can plug in 10/60 for the average time in hours for an exemplary calculation.