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What the difficulty adjustment is really for

The most elegant part of the protocol, and the reason blocks keep arriving at a steady pace.

Bitcoin has no scheduler. Nothing tells miners when to produce a block. Yet blocks arrive at roughly ten-minute intervals, decade after decade, through wildly different amounts of competing hardware.

The mechanism is the difficulty adjustment. Every 2,016 blocks, each node independently measures how long that stretch took and retargets the difficulty so the next stretch should take two weeks.

Because every node performs the same calculation from the same chain, no coordination is required. This is what allows the network to absorb enormous swings in hashrate without anyone being in charge of it.

Written by Andrew Folkler

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