Bitcoin Forum

Hi, I'm new to crypto and still getting my head around how it works.

I've found charts on blockchain.com that show the network difficulty over time (https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/difficulty).

Is there anywhere to find more specific information about difficulty-- eg. What is the current target value for candidate block hashes? Or, on average, roughly how many nonce values need to be tested (in the billions? quadrillions?) to find such a value?

https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/difficulty

Here you can find the real-time bitcoin network Difficulty.

Since the network difficulty is higher finding the exact nonce value tested can't be predicted because it's a probabilistic process, It's safe to say that modern mining operations involve the quadrillions.

There is a difference between difficulty and the target.
Difficulty is only used when we want to represent "how hard" it is to mine a block. Current difficulty is found here: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/ and is calculated as explained here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
Target on the other hand is the actual value used in mining to determine the suitable header hash and is explained here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Target
It's value is found in each block's header in a short 32-bit form that can be converted to the long 256-bit form.

On average it depends on the hashrate of your device which is the number of hashes it can compute per second.
Current estimated total network hashrate is 387 EHS which is 387*10^18 hashes per second.

If you have Bitcoin Core, you can query the current target with getblocktemplate "{\"rules\": [\"segwit\"]}" command.

For the difficulty, you can query the exact difficulty with either one of these commands: getmininginfo or getdifficulty
This webpage also allow you to execute some commands including those two: chainquery.com/bitcoin-cli (http://chainquery.com/bitcoin-cli)

Some will hate this comment but the topic is pretty much documented: Google search
Or go here for more info (since it didn't made it to Google search): learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/difficulty (http://learnmeabitcoin.com/beginners/difficulty) (use search above to see more topics like "target")

Bitcoin difficulty retarget after 2016 blocks that is about 14 days.
Bitcoin Network Difficulty (https://www.bitrawr.com/terminal/difficulty)
Bitcoin Difficulty Estimator (https://newhedge.io/terminal/bitcoin/difficulty-estimator) gives you some estimators from difficulty, difficulty change, date of change.

Buddy, in terms of the current Bitcoin network difficulty, my most preferred platform is Ychat.com.

On the platform, it says; Bitcoin Average Difficulty is at a current level of 55.62, unchanged from 55.62 yesterday and up from 30.29 one year ago. The platform claims it is a change of 0.00% from yesterday and 83.61% from one year ago.

Take your time to go through my source: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_difficulty#:~:text=Bitcoin%20Average%20Difficulty%20is%20at,83.61%25%20from%20one%20year%20ago.