What is Difficulty?
Difficulty refers to the measure of how hard it is for miners to find a valid block in the blockchain. The difficulty level adjusts itself with an aim towards keeping mining times at ten minutes per block. This means that when more miners join the network, or existing miners upgrade their hardware, then competition increases and thus so does difficulty. As such, as hash power increases on a network, its difficulty will also increase making blocks harder to find and verify. If there are fewer miners competing on a network then its difficulty will decrease making blocks easier to mine but resulting in slower transaction confirmations.
How Does Difficulty Change?
The Bitcoin protocol calculates this automatically by adjusting the target each 2016 blocks (or roughly every two weeks). A lower than expected number of hashes results in higher-than-expected difficulties while vice versa applies if too many hashes are found compared with expectations – leading to a lower-than-expected adjustment downward in order for new blocks still be solved within 10 minutes even though miner power has increased or decreased drastically due other factors like upgrades etc.. With Ethereum’s proof of work system Ethash algorithm however it uses dynamic targeting which allows for automatic adjustments after each block meaning that changes can occur much quicker than what happens with bitcoin where updates only happen once every two weeks regardless of any sudden change miner participation levels may experience due external forces outside those regulated by bitcoin’s builtin algorithmic control systems .
