The difficulty of mining – A key element of mining

Bitcoins mining (BTC) is the keystone of Bitcoin blockchain safety and all of its ecosystem. So that minors discover new blocks at a regular rate, the source code, developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, joined an algorithm adjusting the difficulty of mining. The latter adapts to the number of minors present on the network. Feel miners, this new episode of Feel Summer details the concept in depth.

The importance of the difficulty of mining

We are not going to come back to what the mining cryptocurrencies in this article. Simply note that the protocol known as Proof of Work (POW) Request for substantial IT calculations. These calculations imply that minors, to validate a block, optimize their machines in order to resolve the enigma first. Regarding Bitcoin, the mining difficulty algorithm allows the entire system to be stable. Indeed, it allows Maintain a regular period of 10 minutes Before you can find new blocks.

To do this, this algorithm increases or decreases the difficulty of bitcoin mining. The more minors, the more the difficulty increases. If the number of minors in competition decreases, the protocol reduces the difficulty of mining. From then on, the remaining minors can discover blocks with simpler calculations. The Bitcoin network adjusts the mining difficulty By adding or reducing the number of zeros in front of the target hash. Target chopping is a fixed length code that all minors try to beat. The first minor who generates a code with an equal or higher number of zeros wins the competition. It validates the block.

Bitcoin's stable and predictable inflation rate is an asset for the queen of cryptocurrencies. The offer in circulation, capped at 21 million bitcoins, makes it a real active. Its rarity, if demand remains high, should also contribute to maintaining its value. You have understood, without the difficulty of mining, it would be easy to compromise the entire mining process. With the increase in the number of minors and technological evolution, the blocks would be revealed more and more quickly. Thus, new bitcoins would enter into circulation at an unpredictable rate. As a result, the value of the asset could stagnate. Imagine what the ecosystem would become …

The functioning of this precious algorithm

Every 2016 blocks (almost every two weeks), the Bitcoin mining difficulty is updated. The time of difficulty corresponds to each period of 2016 blocks. During this period, the network determines whether minors' activities in the past two weeks have reduced or increased. Thus, the algorithm can define the time necessary to extract a new block. If it is less than 10 minutes, the mining difficulty increases. On the contrary, if it is more than 10 minutes, the difficulty reduced.

The mining difficulty is calculated via several formulas. However, the principal is to divide the objective of difficulty by the current difficulty. The objective of difficulty is a hexadecimal notation of target hash whose difficulty of mining is 1. The current difficulty is the target hash of the most recent transactions block. When we divide these two values, you get an integer number which is the level of mining difficulty. If we obtain a result of 20,000 billion, it will be necessary to generate approximately 20,000 billion hashs before we can find the winning ax. With a little luck, a minor can sometimes find it with much fewer proposals.

The mining difficulties are adjusted by comparing the time necessary to reveal 2016 blocks usually in the time necessary to find the 2016 last blocks. The time to reveal a block being 10 minutes, the time planned to extract 2016 blocks is 20,160 minutes (2016 x 10 minutes). The ratio between the 20 160 minutes and the time it took to scale the last era of difficulty is then multiplied by the most recent level of difficulty. The calculation gives a result which will determine the change of percentage required in the difficulty of mining. This is so that the time required to find a block is always 10 minutes.

Despite the 10 -minute objective, the difficulty of mining cannot evolve above or below four times compared to the current level of difficulty. The upper limit for each time of difficulty is 300%. The lower limit is a modification of 75%. This rule is put in place to eliminate any sudden change in the difficulty of mining.

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