🎯 Auto-Adjusting Difficulty: Keeping Blocks at 10 Minutes
Understand how Bitcoin maintains consistent block times as mining power changes
Your Progress
0 / 5 completed⚖️ Difficulty Adjustment
The network automatically adjusts mining difficulty to maintain a consistent block time, regardless of how many miners join or leave.
🎯 Why Adjust Difficulty?
If 1,000 more miners join the network, blocks would be found much faster than every 10 minutes. This would break the system's predictability.
The network automatically requires more leading zeros in the hash, making it harder to find valid blocks. This slows mining back to ~10 minutes per block.
Whether there are 100 or 1 million miners, blocks are found approximately every 10 minutes on average.
🎮 Difficulty Simulator
Adjust network hash rate and difficulty to see how they affect block time:
📊 How Bitcoin Adjusts Difficulty
Bitcoin recalculates difficulty approximately every 2 weeks (2,016 blocks × 10 minutes = 14 days)
The network measures how long it actually took to mine the last 2,016 blocks
All nodes agree on the new difficulty - no central authority needed
📈 Difficulty Increases When:
- •More miners join network
- •Hardware becomes more efficient
- •Blocks found faster than 10 min
- •Network adds more hash power
📉 Difficulty Decreases When:
- •Miners leave network (unprofitable)
- •Price drops, miners shut down
- •Blocks found slower than 10 min
- •Network loses hash power