What is Difficulty adjustment?
The recalculation of the mining target that happens every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks.
The adjustment is capped at a factor of four in either direction per period, which prevents a single anomalous window from destabilising the schedule.
Watching the adjustment is more informative than watching raw hashrate over short windows, because it is computed from actual elapsed time over a long sample rather than inferred from a handful of blocks.
Related terms
Difficulty
The parameter setting how hard it is to find a valid block, adjusted every 2,016 blocks to keep the average…
MiningHashrate
The estimated total computing power searching for Bitcoin blocks, usually quoted in exahashes per second…
How it worksBlock height
The number of blocks in the chain before the current one, counting the genesis block as zero. It is the…
This definition is part of the Bitcoin Logical glossary. For the fuller explanation, start with Learn, or see the live numbers on The Bitcoin Signal.