Bitcoin Forum

why bitcoin mining difficulty is increased?

I just want to knows that why the bitcoin mining difficulty level is increased and i am afraid of the life of future miners.Maybe in future the miners electricity will cost more than our rewards because of the difficulty level.

It's part of the Bitcoin specification.  You don't already know this???

If it difficulty isn't inceased so now we should be flood in the BTC and it price will not up and hot like this.
Welcome new ATH BTC price $6530

This happens all the time. The difficulty goes up, the price goes up. The price goes up, the difficulty goes up. Hashrate goes up, the price and difficulty both go up.

You don't mine to earn dollars, you mine them to earn bitcoin. Don't pay attention to roi calculators. Just know that you have a machine that makes btc for you and you got it at a set price. You run that machine at a set price, too, but the bitcoin price keeps going up.  Don't worry about what the coins you mine today are worth today. Think about what they might be worth next year.

I think it is caused due to the number of bitcoins have to be decreased day by day,so the rewards are also getting thinner.But we don't have to worry about the electricity because the price of bitcoin is keeps increasing.

Perhaps try reading up on what BTC mining is all about...  ::) There is a Beginners & Help section (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=39.0) in the Forum just for folks starting out. I highly suggest you browse through it and post utterly basic queries like this one there...

BTC has value because of the work required to process the transactions.

The BTC network strives to keep an average time of 10 minutes per-block found, it does this by adjusting difficulty every 2 weeks or so.

If if more/faster miners go online and blocks are found too fast, diff goes up to increase the effort which increases time needed per-block to bring it back to the target of 10-min average. If less miners are online and block are too slow then diff goes down to hold the 10-min average.

Yes as time goes by older, less efficient miners become less profitable and eventually will eat more than they earn so as tech advances you need to upgrade. So what? That's how Life goes in pretty much any business.

Welcome to the community :) You're a little bit late to discover some basic stuff, but it doesn't matter. If you wanna be miner in the future you should know there are lots of altcoins to mine and gain money, BTC is not the only option. And there is a rule which works proper in every single economic situation: 'Always early comers win.'  ;D

hi,
it happens not only to BTC, but to all coins. I mean when the value of a coin increases the difficulty of mining increases too...  :)

Hmmm, that means the more the increase in the value, the more the increase in mining difficulty

Only indirectly.
What actually happens is that as a coins value increases more people are going to mine it. More miners working means blocks are found faster and that in-turn is what causes dif to rise as the blockchain networks adjust to keep their target time.

Because the number of bitcoins is very small, people want to dig a bitcoin a lot. As the demand for bitcoin is increasing, the difficulty of digging bitcoins will be greater.

Bitcoin difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks to attain an average block find rate of 10 minutes.  Usually it adjusts up but sometimes down as well, depending on how fast blocks are found.

Main reason why the difficulty is increasing is because on how it was programmed to be mined.

There is a total of 21 million bitcoin to be mined from its inception and on its first four years 10.5 million is scheduled to be mined, and scheduled to decrease by half every 4 years until the last coin is mined. So if before a block is consists of 50 coins then 25 then as of now a block is only consists of 12.5 coins and will be decreased by half again.

To answer your question about its efficiency when it comes to electricity. During the time that a block is consists of 50 coin a coin is only priced for less than $100 and now price is $6000 for a block with 12.5 coin. Since the price per coin is increasing mining is still profitable.

It is the way Bitcoin is meant to be. The production of bitcoin in halved every year. That increases the difficulty and the cost of mining. That is how system works and why the price of bitcoin keeps on increasing.

This happens all the time. The difficulty goes up, the price goes up. The price goes up, the difficulty goes up. Hashrate goes up, the price and difficulty both go up.

You don't mine to earn dollars, you mine them to earn bitcoin. Don't pay attention to roi calculators. Just know that you have a machine that makes btc for you and you got it at a set price. You run that machine at a set price, too, but the bitcoin price keeps going up.  Don't worry about what the coins you mine today are worth today. Think about what they might be worth next year.

If difficulty increase that the price will increase too.

Could there possibly be a software that can make mining easier.

In other words, you are asking, "is there a way to cheat?"

Again, part of what makes a coin have value is the effort required to get it. Crypto coin algorithms are created to be exceedingly computationally and/or hardware intensive for that reason. If someone want to mine a coin they MUST put some effort into it by getting and running the hardware needed. It should not be a surprise that coins that have high value like BTC require expensive miners. Find a flaw in the code that can be exploited to make a coin easier to mine and:
a. you would for a time destroy the value of the coin
b. the blockchain networks would eventually cancel the effect of cheating by adjusting diff higher

TANSTAAFL

No. If there's such then block retarget time and difficulty changes would be completely useless. Also, with a currency that can be gamed, bitcoin would not reach this far in terms of value knowing that acquiring it is easy and need not any hard work. ASICs and dedicated miners would be useless resulting into a sloppy economy and no market for mining overall.

It is being done to stabilize the value of Bitcoin. If it is not placed in the system. Anybody could mine Bitcoins.

So many wrong answers and just reiterating for anyone tha missed it.

The purpose of the difficulty value is to keep the average block time at 10 minutes, regardless of how many or how few miners there are.

If the difficulty increases, it is because there are more miners (or miners add more equipment).


The halving does not increase the difficulty or the cost of mining, nor does it cause the price to increase (at least not directly).

Difficulty level is increasing because of the number of miners and mining equipment that are solving the blocks. Since the rate of the blocks is 10 mins per block if more miners are mining at the same time then they are going to compete with each other for that same block. If the blocks are solved slower then the next difficulty might go low.

Since the price of bitcoin keeps on going high then mining would still be profitable for now because the increase can compensate the increase in difficulty level.

I think when bitcoin increases and not only bitcoin but all altcoin price increases then its exploitation will decrease significantly as if exploiting too much when price increases will affect the market and its price will decrease. At that time, the amount of coin supplied to the market would satisfy the buyer, leading to a decrease in its value

Because of the number of bitcoins decreases , amount of miners keeps increasing.

Thank You for the info!

In my opinion, digging BTC is a difficult and tedious task. I would never do it despite the experience I had. I prefer to hold more coins and wait until they multiply themselves. Let's leave for good and experienced diggers.

Mining difficulty upward it's because related the number of people mining a supply and demand kind of thing and the size of the blockchain, an intentional system design.

i dont know about mining but if i can say something, because mining is simple ways to get bitcoin. you just buy what you need for mine, great spec to do that, give order for your computer and it will run. you just wait for your result. so, maybe mining make difficult because of it.

When value of coin is raising the dificulty of mining is increasing too. That's naturaly because code is becoming more difficult to mine

 Day by day people are getting aware of bitcoin mining so there is chances for more people to get involved in this field . The interest of this modern generational group of people to make more money for their pocket more than they earn and have the knowledge with computer usage ,will be in front of the computer. The usage of electricity and network will be slower these all may increase the difficulty in bitcoin mining.

if you only doing this mining, all our bitcoins now in market will became low?

The more members who miner, the more intense the competition. computers are very good at solving math problems, so bitcoin network deliberately makes the solution more difficult.
Otherwise, all bitcoins will be depleted mined in just a few minutes. This is why there are a lot of special hardware in the market that are specifically aimed at bitcoin mining.

I also want to save it. which makes it difficult to determine if more users are exploiting. So many mining users are causing trouble.

Yes some inexperienced miners who feels they can become rich overnight are causing more damage.

Nailed it mining is worth only if limited miners are there and if they work for betterment of bitcoin community and if everyone starts mining then obviously bitcoin's value will drop and there will be equal number of miners as the bitcoin holders which makes no sense.

if not mistaken perhaps because of unclear environmental regulations and rapid changes in policy.

Mining difficulty increase in bitcoin is a normal thing. The blockchain technology is designed that way to adapt when there is more miners.

Well the mining difficulty is always related to the amount of computing power that the bitcoin has , and as we all know in the recent months bitcoin has gained a huge popularity due to its hyge price increase which meant that it brought with it many people who want to get some profit from it and this created even more computing power than before, and so to ensure that the avrage block solution stays the same the mining difficulty has to be increased, otherwise the supply that we from bitcoin have will get depleted so quickly.

No. You would be extremely surprised how many people don't know this or partially understand difficulty. I think the number of people who enter the space and actually read up on the satoshi nakamoto whitepaper is becoming really really small. So no you shouldn't be surprised that people don't know about this.


Your explanation of the difficulty is spot on. If more and more hashing power is added to the network the difficulty is naturally increased. And if the hashing power drops after a longer period of time, the difficulty corrects accordingly. It's basically to prevent too blocks being mined and thus releasing an unnecessary big amount of bitcoin if it were relatively easy to mine a block.
The halving of the block subsidy on the other hand is a bit off but that's just me. I think that the halving does have an (direct) influence on the price of bitcoin. Atleast in the long run. If every four years the block subsidy halves and let's say the demand doubles as well, wouldn't it be logical that in this case the price would go up as well.

You are confusing "supply" with "production". Unlike other products, bitcoins are not consumed so the two terms are different. Even though the production of bitcoins goes down, the supply of bitcoins (both money supply and market supply) is always (generally) increasing. The halving just changes the rate of increase.

The bitcoin mining difficulty has undergone another major change. It seems the difficulty continues to increase by a higher percentage over the past few months. This latest change represents mining more difficult, indicating a lot of new hashpower has come online over the past several weeks. It is unclear if this is the case.
We can only speculate as to what type of mining hardware is being deployed on a large scale all of a sudden.

Well, i should agree to this. Because once we mine today it will not cost as like what it will be cost on the future, when mining, always think for the better future and think for the price of a bitcoin in the near future. If bitcoin price today is $6500 then think of that bitcoin price will increase up to $10k or more.

I also do not always pay attention to ROI, as long as I can do the maintenance system then one year is not an important time to get the initial capital, the ever-changing difference with the harder blocks makes the system stronger, it will extend the mining time. What we need to consider is the system of care and regulation on a regular basis.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is periodically adjusted to ensure that block time stays at about 10 minutes. As more mining capability is brought online, difficulty will increase accordingly. Difficulty also increased because more miners are now mining bitcoin so the reward will get smaller and smaller.

Bitcoin mining difficulty is increased because of the current value of bitcoin, the transaction fee affected also due to flactuating of the price. Also continuous increasing of number of miner will make it to difficult to mine bitcoin.

Earnings on bitcoin are becoming more popular, with every day more and more crypto currency appears on the market, it is necessary to be very vigilant and to choose for yourself an investment wisely.

why bitcoin mining difficulty is increased?

I just want to knows that why the bitcoin mining difficulty level is increased and i am afraid of the life of future miners.Maybe in future the miners electricity will cost more than our rewards because of the difficulty level.

Yes. The difficulty will probably increase until the revenue from your mining is less than the cost of your electricity.

The difficulty increase is a function of the global hash rate that's mining the coins.

This is due to the design criteria of bitcoin. It is designed in such a way as to keep up a certain limit on daily block mining. Bitcoin network is so desgined to solve around 144 blocks on daily basis. You see more sharks in the pond finding fishes would mean difficulty for each shark. So as people are coming up with new solutions to mine bitcoin. The difficult or the hash rate is increasing to mantain the average.

Don't grab for the untwisted complex currencies such as Bitcoin or the etherium - there are hundreds of very simple to extract, but theoretically claimed, coins that can easily be mused even with simple equipment. Here, and stuff yourself quietly e-wallets and put it back in a box, and there you look and shoot, not in 2018 - so in 2019.

Difficulty is increased because of the rate of bitcoin.
It surged and going higher and higher.
And when the the rate is so high, it attracts so many people to be miners to mine bitcoin.

because the higher the price the harder it is also to be obtained
the cheaper the price the easier it can be

No you are wrong. Mining difficulty doesnt really depend on the value of bitcoin. Price isnt connected at all. Mining difficulty do increase because there are already lots of miners in the network trying to solve out blocks which means the more miners the higher possibility to increase mining difficulty.Its just like that and this is why mining bitcoin wont really be sustainable for long term because of the difficulty.

it's very simple the more the miners the more difficult the network

As per my knowledge mining difficulty directly reflects the amount of computing power that the Bitcoin network has. This is adjusted on a periodic basis so that the average block solution time is 10 minutes (Bitcoin clients recalculate the difficulty every 2016 blocks). The difficulty can go up or down depending on how much effort people are putting into mining.

Bitcoin mining is not like just farming. It takes a limited amount of coins from a limited source. There are more and more miners increasing day by day and this is making mining difficult and costly too. If we have to solve this one need to increase the amount of total BTC in the world or one day there will be no miners left around the world as the cost of electricty will exceed the profit.

Due to the volume of electricity, it consumes as the specifications go higher than the higher the consume electricity it will require, probably also one the reasons is that because the demand tends to increase as the price of goes up and up as the day passes by the volume of activity for miners are getting much more difficult that is stressing them out.

Isn't it because the miners for bitcoin are increasing and the coins to be mined were halves every year? There is also the increase in demand but don't worry mining is still profitable even before people can mine a good amount of it for everyday

I think because the hardware so expensive. not all can relate unless you are technical persons and willing to invest despite of prize of the parts are not affordable and have knowledge to maintain the operation. if the unit having a problem your date will also lost.

its depends of the bitcoin network

The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks. At the desired rate of one block each 10 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly two weeks to find. If the previous 2016 blocks took more than two weeks to find, the difficulty is reduced. If they took less than two weeks, the difficulty is increased. The change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under two weeks the previous 2016 blocks took to find.

To find a block, the hash must be less than the target. The hash is effectively a random number between 0 and 2**256-1. The offset for difficulty 1 is 0xffff * 2**208

the bitcoin mining will be increase due to the increasing difficulty increase because of the bitcoin will be coming a popular coin.

>>The harder it is to mine bitcoin, the more valuable it becomes. Just like gold, it's not easy to come by.
i dont think because of a miner joing the btc pools the price is directly higher valued.
price = bid and ask that meets.
there can be many miners, if no new customer/or old wants to buy the btc there is no trade.

so be prepared that miner shoot over the max diff. a while, then learn that its not profitable anymore, then a correction sets in. (hashrate)

Since the algorithm of btc is getting older, there Needs to be higher difficuty, both in mathematical (logistical grow the form of function is called in german, not quite sure about enlish Terminus) sense and that the value of btc increases!

Because more miners joined the network.

I've got some information on mining difficulty in my crypto and blockchain dictionary, decryptionary.com.

Check it out at: https://decryptionary.com/dictionary/mining-difficulty/ (https://decryptionary.com/dictionary/mining-difficulty/)

It's a simple, concise version of pretty much everything said in this post.

I think because the people that mining now are more than before, the volume of electricity can be ever more high and the hardware are so expensive, at the end i don't if it is still convenient

because 7 nm Chips ?

Japanese Company Will Launch New Bitcoin Mining Operation With 7 nm Chips

http://www.nasdaq.com/article/japanese-company-will-launch-new-bitcoin-mining-operation-with-7-nm-chips-cm844523

I think it was due to the number of miners that are increasing very fast. Due to the numbers, the difficulty therefore increased also..

It is similar to simple Demand-Supply formula. When there is a demand for setting up mining the difficulty should adjust to a higher value.
as one of our members mentioned, it is a specification in Bitcoin code itself.
If the difficulty is not increasing with increase in the number of miners, there is a threat of moving towards centralization. To address this problem in another way, some other altcoins are moving from PoW to PoS which indirectly suppressing the efforts put in mining and eventually calculation power, electricity.

it is very difficult to mining the bitcoin but in future it is very difficult

every year bitcoin difficulty will increase as the demand and price increase mining new bitcoin will become difficult as the algorithm is difficult to solve

Bitcoin is a resource. And as we all studied in our economy classes and also in some of our marketing and business classes, if a source of money or the resource that can equate to money will suddenly gain popularity, Scarcity and competition are always bound to happen. It is the inevitable and that is what is happening as of now in Bitcoin Mining and other forms of well known cryptocurrency!

I see...thanks for opening my mind :D

The cost of electricity versus the reward of mining has game theory behind it and is self-balancing.

Difficulty should increase with the time for maintaining security and trustworthiness of bitcoin architecture. Otherwise with the development of high performance computers/ servers, someone could lie to the blockchain network and may create un-legitimate transactions and blocks. For preventing this difficulty should increase to maintain block creating time to 10 min.

I believe things are getting killer for small users. Right now, the fees is simply unreal for sending any amount, so it is because of minors, as they are getting higher rewards.

I still believe there is so much into mining, but obviously a lot of money is required to start up and more importantly to be aware of the happening around Bitcoin World (https://bitcoin-price.com) and how it all works!

As long as the supply of Bitcoins continue to decrease, more coins will circulate around the network. Which makes the difficulty even higher. What makes me really bother is that one day, all 21M coins have already been mined. I was wondering what might happen next. We need miners to produce blocks which is needed for confirmation of BTC transactions. Will they continue for the sake of many? Or is there an alternative way which might make things better? I just hope that when that day comes, BTC will stay on top and won't be erased in the history of cryptocurrencies.

A decreasing block reward indirectly causes the difficulty to decrease, not increase.

When number of users mining on one coin increases, the difficulties increase. I could see, day by day the mining platform is expended and the difficulties increases. We can better skip mining from one coin to other depending upon the availability and profits. I do mine BTC, ZCASH, ETH and DASH from CPU. I switch over from one to the other coin. Receive enough profits.

Do we have any other ways to reduce this difficulties. I would be happy to hear from my folks here.

Traffic on a same coin would cause difficulties. People tend to mine the coins which do have high values in the current market. This causes too much difficulties. So always, set the system mined on different coins switching over to other one automatically. Linux platform would be more convenient for mining with a rig containing CPU, MB and GCs.

tworeasons:
a) stable block finding times. 10min in average as target.
b) rising security level, the more miners, the harder for a single entity to gain 50% hashpower

I was never fascinated with the mining due to too much work with very less rewards. Also it involves a huge investment considering the equipment, place to put those machines, cooling and electricity charges etc due to which not everyone can afford such expenses and also with the increase in difficulty it is now not much feasibility left for the people to mine it.

This is so that I do not have an exaggerated addition of bitcoins in the market.
It was predicted that over time bitcoin would gain popularity, so more and more people would seek ways to get it. However, if the difficulty were the same since when it started there would be a flood of bitcoins in the market at one time, causing its price fall and possibly the market crash of criptocurrencies.

It's part of the parameter. Bitcoin mining might stop being profitable in some years or it's price might increase high enough. So far it's a matter of mystery, the only thing we can do is keep up with the news, analyze the information that comes up and hopefully in the future being able to see it coming before it happens.

I think because it become more popular and the number of minner grows every hour so offer is more than demand