Does Bitcoin's mining difficulty in terms of pure computational power adjust downwards, or is it monotonically increasing?
I got contradicting replies.
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
Does Bitcoin's mining difficulty in terms of pure computational power adjust downwards, or is it monotonically increasing?
I got contradicting replies.
Not monotonically because of fluctuations in price, but increasing over time due to increasing price of BTC (except at halvings of the block reward) and increasing transaction demand which drives transaction fee revenue higher. The revenue per block determines the level of systemic hashrate which is profitable. The difficulty is readjusted automatically by the protocol as necessary to maintain the block interval at roughly 10 minutes.