Bitcoin Mining Is Now Harder Than Ever—16 Years After Satoshi Started It All

It’s Bitcoin’s birthday: The very first Bitcoin block was mined 16 years ago today. 

And the network is stronger than ever, with mining difficulty reaching a new all-time high mark as the biggest cryptocurrency rides into the new year. 

Data from Bitinfocharts shows that Bitcoin difficulty hit a new all-time high of 109.78 trillion hashes as of Monday—the highest ever seen for the original blockchain network. That means it takes that huge amount of hashes to mine a new block.

Hashing is the computing process of turning data into a fixed-length string of letters and numbers. In the Bitcoin mining world, powerful machines do this as fast as they can in order for new blocks to be added to the blockchain—which is just a long list of transactions. 

Simply put, with the difficulty level now harder than ever, the network is even more secure—just as was always intended for the biggest crypto network. 

Bitcoin’s first block was mined on January 3, 2009. Known as the “Genesis Block,” Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto minted 50 BTC into existence with the move. 

Since then, 877,665 blocks have been mined and added to the network’s long ledger. On a blockchain, blocks contain data on transactions. Only miners can add data to the network, and the difficulty level helps prevent unauthorized additions or edits to the chain, as it would take an incredible amount of computational power to take over the network.

And Bitcoin’s mysterious creator or creators are likely happy with how durable the network turned out to be, given 16 years now of increasing difficulty.

Edited by Andrew Hayward