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From the collapse of computing power to see the automatic adjustment of bitcoin mining mechanism

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Bitcoin will reduce the block time to around 10 minutes with subsequent difficulty adjustments.

原文标题：《为什么说不用太担心比特币算力大跌？》

Alex Thorn is head of enterprise-wide research at Galaxy Digital

By Lu Jiangfei, Chainnews

The day before yesterday, June 27, 2021, was the slowest day of block production in the past decade (since 2010), with an average block time of 23 minutes, compared to the previous average block time of around 10 minutes. China's Sichuan province and other provinces recently halted bitcoin mining, arguably the most disruptive action the network has ever faced. But the Bitcoin network is not broken, it is adapting to market changes and will thrive in the future.

为什么说不用太担心比特币算力大跌？

The table below shows the 25 slowest average bitcoin block days since 2010. We didn't include the data for 2009 because almost no one knew about bitcoin at the time, and because it was new, many of the days were very long.

为什么说不用太担心比特币算力大跌？

Blocktime is the interval in which miners find and add blocks to the blockchain, and Bitcoin tries to maintain block time within a relatively stable range: one block every 10 minutes. After every 2,016 blocks, Bitcoin adjusts the difficulty of mining depending on the network, either making it easier or harder to mine:

If computing power increases to the point where it takes less than 10 minutes to mine a bitcoin block (or less than two weeks to mine 2,016 blocks), then the Bitcoin network will subsequently make mining more difficult;

If computing power drops and it takes more than 10 minutes to mine a bitcoin block, the Bitcoin network then makes mining easier.

With other provinces such as Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Yunnan and Xinjiang all starting to halt Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin computing power is expected to continue to fall, and within 5-6 days we could see a significant reduction in the difficulty of mining, with this adjustment restoring block times to an average level of around 10 minutes. However, until the difficulty of mining bitcoin is adjusted, the network will continue to produce blocks very slowly.

Frankly, mining is difficult to adjust the currency one of the most elegant "function of" can not only ensure that the network can absorb the impact of the work force short-term plunge, also can effectively perform the currency monetary policy, this is because the difficulty of mining to ensure that the currency block must appear as planned, so the new casting BTC will appear as planned.

Once the difficulty of mining bitcoin is adjusted, the Bitcoin miners who remain on the network will gain more market share and, with it, more profits. On Friday, we're expected to see the biggest difficulty (downward) correction in Bitcoin's history, but before that happens, we'll probably have to wait a little longer for bitcoin to block.

For the Bitcoin network, according to the data on the chain, the suspension of bitcoin mining activities in Sichuan and other provinces has indeed brought great damage. However, even under such a large scale of industry shocks, although the network block production rate has slowed down, but we found that Bitcoin has actually shown great resilience and vitality.

Some have suggested that this could be a "state attack" on Bitcoin, but so far the Bitcoin network has coped pretty well. If you look at human history, what product can continue to function after the "50% industry base" is misplaced? Only Bitcoin seems capable of withstanding interference on this scale.

On the other hand, many bitcoin miners have already started packing up and moving their machines to other regions, with new mining sites expected to be spread across several neighboring countries and North America, where there is abundant low-cost energy and local interest in bitcoin mining.

Concentration of computing power in a single jurisdiction is not good for Bitcoin in the long run, and we would like to see more and more decentralization of Bitcoin mining. Only by achieving this goal can we truly control our destiny.