What is Cryptocurrency difficulty?

Cryptocurrency difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to mine a block in a blockchain for a particular cryptocurrency. A high cryptocurrency difficulty means it takes additional computing power to verify transactions entered on a blockchain—a process called mining.

Cryptocurrency difficulty is a concept based on bitcoin mining, which measures the difficulty of mining blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin difficulty is a dynamic parameter set to ensure that the generation rate of new bitcoin blocks is at an average rate of one block every 10min. When the network finds that the generation rate is faster than 10min per block, the difficulty will be increased, and the difficulty will be reduced when the generation rate is slower than 10min per block.

In the Bitcoin network, each difficulty update is recomputed by 2,016 blocks and depends on how long it takes to find those 2,016 blocks. In general, the difficulty of mining Bitcoin is adjusted once every 14 days. It is also worth mentioning that in order to prevent drastic changes in the difficulty of the network, the Bitcoin network can only be adjusted the difficulty to a multiple of 4 forever. In other words, whenever difficulty adjustment occurs, the difficulty value of the Bitcoin network increases by up to 300% or decreases by up to 75%.

The higher the Cryptocurrency difficulty, the harder it is to mine blocks. At the same hashrate, the higher the mining difficulty, the less number of bitcoins are mined. As bitcoin mining has become increasingly difficult, it has become more difficult to mine bitcoins using a Personal computer, but instead has to be mined with professional mining machines.