Bitcoin Mining Difficulty
The current difficulty, the projected change at the next retarget and a live countdown to the adjustment.
How the difficulty adjustment works
Bitcoin targets one block every 10 minutes. Since miners constantly add and remove hardware, the protocol recalibrates every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks. If the last 2,016 blocks arrived faster than two weeks, difficulty rises by the same proportion; if slower, it falls. This simple feedback loop has kept block production on schedule since 2009 while the network hashrate grew by more than a trillion times.
Right now difficulty is 127.17T, which implies about 910.3 EH/s of hashrate. The estimated change shown above is projected from how fast blocks are arriving in the current epoch, so it drifts as new blocks come in. A positive number means hashrate joined the network and mining is about to get harder; a negative number means machines went offline.
For miners, difficulty is one half of the revenue equation; the Bitcoin price is the other. Both are combined in hashprice, the dollar revenue per PH/s per day. You can watch how pools react to retargets on the pool comparison and the live dashboard.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Bitcoin mining difficulty?
Difficulty is a number that sets how hard it is to find a valid Bitcoin block. The higher the difficulty, the more hashes miners must compute on average per block. It exists so that blocks keep arriving roughly every 10 minutes no matter how much mining power joins or leaves the network.
How often does Bitcoin difficulty adjust?
Every 2,016 blocks, which is about every two weeks. The protocol compares how long the last 2,016 blocks actually took against the two week target. If they came faster, difficulty rises proportionally; if slower, it falls. A single adjustment is capped at 4x in either direction.
What happens to miners when difficulty increases?
Each machine finds proportionally fewer blocks, so revenue per terahash falls. Hashprice captures this instantly: rising difficulty with a flat Bitcoin price squeezes margins, and the least efficient miners eventually turn off.
Can difficulty go down?
Yes. When hashrate leaves the network, blocks slow down and the next retarget lowers difficulty. The largest drop in history was about 28% in July 2021 after mining was banned in China.