The difficulty of mining Bitcoin increased by 6.2% on Tuesday, surpassing the 100 billion level for the first time in history. This came after the network's average hashrate reached an all-time high.
The new difficulty level of 101.7 billion was recorded at block height 868,896, surpassing the previous high of 95.7 billion.
Bitcoin mining difficulty is a relative measure that is automatically adjusted every two weeks to ensure that new blocks are mined, on average, every 10 minutes, regardless of the number of active miners.
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Prior to the adjustment, Bitcoin blocks were mined at a faster rate of one block every 9 minutes and 27 seconds, which caused the difficulty to increase.
As the number of miners increases, the difficulty of mining Bitcoins also increases due to the need for more computational power and energy to find the correct hash.