|
Title: Bitcoin Difficulty Explanation and ETA? Post by: Clavulanic on April 30, 2011, 10:11:40 PM I understand the difficulty of mining is supposed to increase over time, but now how or what affects this.
Is it the number of people mining/power of miners? Could someone give me an explanation of this? Also, I thought there was a site that explained this and had a chart with ETAs or something, but can't find it. Title: Re: Bitcoin Difficulty Explanation and ETA? Post by: Ricochet on April 30, 2011, 10:40:20 PM https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty has a good explanation, but in a nutshell, it's a "magic variable" that determines how easy or hard it is to successfully mine a block. The goal is for the network to average one block every 10 minutes, so every 2016 blocks (which in theory should be every 2 weeks), the system adjusts the difficulty based on how quickly those 2016 blocks were mined. If it took fewer than 2 weeks, the difficulty rises; if it took longer, then the difficulty goes down.
So yes, it is a delayed response to the pure amount of computing power in the network. |