The history of difficulty adjustment: the annual growth rate of difficulty reached 1224363% in 2010, and only 0.82% this year

Jurica Bulovic, Fidelity's head of bitcoin mining

Lu jiangfei, chain smell

Exploring the history of bitcoin's mining difficulty adjustment: in which year did bitcoin's mining difficulty increase and decrease the most?

The difficulty of mining the bitcoin network has been reduced from 16.6t to 13.9t, down 15.95 per cent and the second biggest drop on record. Here, we'll explore the history of bitcoin mining difficulty adjustments based on Coin Metrics.

The bitcoin creation block was created on January 3, 2009, and the mining difficulty started from "1". Nothing has changed since then. Why has the difficulty of mining not changed at all? Didn't satoshi nakamoto perfectly design the time for bitcoin to come out in "an average of 10 minutes"?

In fact, mining has actually become a lot easier in bitcoin's first year (it took the bitcoin network more than a month to extract 2,016 blocks, for example), but since mining can't be less than 1, the number has stayed the same.

The chart below shows the number of bitcoin blocks mined per day throughout 2009, and you can see that most of the blocks were mined below 144, which is the expected average. In 2009, the average block time was about 20.8 minutes.

On December 30, 2009, bitcoin mining difficulty was adjusted for the first time, increasing from 1 to 1.1829, an increase of 18.29%. The following year, 2010, the difficulty of mining bitcoin increased from 1.18 to 14.5k, an increase of 12,245 times!

In fact, every year since then, bitcoin has become harder to mine, trying to keep up with price increases.

Here's the annual growth rate of bitcoin mining difficulty since 2009:

2009:18.29%

2010:1224363% (started GPU mining)

2011:7908%

2012:157%

2013:39533% (started ASIC mining)

2014:3341%

2015:156%

2016:206%

2017:490%

2018:191%

2019:130%

2020 to date: 0.82% (up 20% since the beginning of 2020, until the last time the difficulty of mining decreased)

The following chart shows the trend of mining difficulty since the establishment of the bitcoin network:

Another noteworthy statistic: the difficulty of mining on the bitcoin network changed a total of 294 times, with mining difficulty increasing 246 times and decreasing 48 times.

The following chart shows the historical variation of bitcoin mining difficulty (%). Note: the Y-axis is limited to 100%, but there was actually a 300% outlier.

The top three bitcoin mining difficulties are:

On July 16, 2010, the increase was 300% (it is worth mentioning that this is the maximum value of mining difficulty designed by satoshi nakamoto);

In the three days before July 13, 2010, the increase was 93.12%;

On May 26, 2011, it was up 78.15%.

Of the 246 increases in the difficulty of digging, 120 were single-digit, 125 were double-digit, and one was a staggering triple-digit increase!

Next, let's take a look at how bitcoin mining has become easier:

The first drop in the difficulty of mining bitcoin occurred on May 19, 2010, with a 7.81% drop. In addition, the three biggest drops in the difficulty of mining bitcoin were:

On October 21, 2011, the decrease was 18.03%;

On March 26, 2020, the decline was 15.95%;

On December 3, 2018, the decline was 15.13 percent.

In addition, only five times in bitcoin's history has the difficulty of mining decreased by double digits!

Some bonus tips:

What does the difficulty of mining bitcoin represent?

The bitcoin block header consists of three sets of block metadata. The first is a set of data that references the hash value of the parent block, which is used to connect the block to the previous block in the blockchain; the second set, difficulty, timestamp, and nonce, is related to mining competition; and the third is merkle root (a data structure that effectively summarizes all transactions in the block). In order for a block to be valid (also known as "mining"), the block head hash value must be lower than a certain value L (called the target value). The range of hash values can be very large (2 ^ 256), but the target value set is much lower.

In effect, the target value L will be adjusted once every 2,016 blocks are mined, in proportion to the increase/decrease in the time required to extract a block in the previous period. Mining difficulty D is obtained according to the target value L. Intuitively, the smaller the target value L, the more difficult it is to find an effective hash.

For example, if the average time for a given block to come out is 11 minutes (10 per cent longer than the expected 10-minute interval), the next bitcoin mine will be 10 per cent harder to mine.

The current mining difficulty value is: 13,912,524,048,945. The number means that mining a bitcoin block is much harder than the original. So, as you can see, the bitcoin network now requires 13,912,524,048,945 hashes more than the original block to find a block.

Finally, I'd like to share an interesting fact: suppose the bitcoin network has no difficulty adjustment mechanism, but also has the current network computing power. What would it look like? If so, the average time to excavate a block would be   4.3 * 10 ^ 11 & have spent Seconds, in other words, we can dig out & cake in a second; 2.32 * 10 ^ & have spent A block.

Source link: twitter.com

The original translation link: https://www.chainnews.com/articles/311404659475.htm

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