Bitcoin Difficulty is set to go through a decline on Thursday, breaking a long chain of increases across the past seven network adjustments.
Its value is entirely controlled by the code Satoshi wrote, meaning no third party has any say on how the Difficulty will change. The BTC creator established one simple rule for the chain to follow: the block production rate (that is, the speed at which miners are performing their task) should remain constant at 10 minutes per block.
Whenever miners mine faster than this speed, the network responds by raising the Difficulty to slow the validators back down to the standard rate. Similarly, it lowers the metric instead if miners are having a hard time meeting the quota.
The network makes these changes in biweekly events known as adjustments. The next adjustment is set to occur on Thursday, October 16th. Miners have been slower than the chain needs since the last adjustment, so the Difficulty will go up tomorrow.
As is visible above, miners have produced a block at an average interval of 10.33 minutes in the last two weeks, which is 0.33 minutes slower than the standard block time. To correct for this, the network is estimated to drop its Difficulty by around 3.2%.
From the graph, it’s apparent that not only has the Bitcoin Difficulty been climbing recently, the last six adjustments have in fact resulted in a new all-time high (ATH).
Whenever new players join the space, Difficulty usually pushes up to compensate for the speed increase that comes with extra power, thus making it so that the same reward has to now be fought over by a larger pool of miners.
Considering this context, the upcoming drop in the Bitcoin Difficulty will be a welcome relief for the miners.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $110,400, down more than 9% over the last week.
