VietMX Staff asked 3 years ago
Mining difficulty is the degree that determines how hard it is for miners in terms of hashing power (and thus also time) to find an eligible hash aka signature for their block (a block of transactions needs an eligible hash to be verified and added to the blockchain). On the Bitcoin blockchain, miners try to find an eligible hash by hashing random numbers.
A block of transactions will only be accepted by the rest of the network if it has a signature (hash) that meets certain requirements (in example of Bitcoin, the signature needs to start with a certain number of zeroes). In order to find this signature, miners are spending computational power (hashing power) to perform a set of pre-determined operations on random numbers untill they find a number that leads to an output number that meets the requirements.
Finding an output that starts with only one zero is much easier (generally more common) than finding an output number that starts with five consecutive zeroes (this is pretty rare so it would take much more time to find a number that leads to such output).
For example block 100 (back in 2009) only required a signature that started with eight consecutive zeroes, whereas the last recent block (block 542865) needed a signature that started with at least 18 consecutive zeroes.
