Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Since The Start

As of the date of this writing, block 737,000, Bitcoin is almost two-thirds into its 366th difficulty epoch. A difficulty epoch is a period in which 2,016 blocks are added to Bitcoin’s ledger, ideally in 20,160 minutes, or 14 days. If the epoch ends in less time, the network adjusts the difficulty of successfully mining a Bitcoin block upwards to regain a 10-minute block cadence, and vice versa. The entire history of Bitcoin’s difficulty is shown in the graphic below (you may need to zoom in — it’s quite a huge graphic).Figure one: Historical Difficulty Changes Since Inception

In total, 15 epochs, around 4% of all epochs, experienced no difficulty change. These just so happened to be the very first 15 epochs where basically just Satoshi Nakamoto, Hal Finney and a few dozen other people were mining. Of the remaining 351 epochs, 283 (77.5% of all epochs) would see a difficulty increase, with 67 epochs seeing a difficulty decrease. We will delve into these periods of decrease later in this piece.

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