Bitcoin mining is now harder than ever – 16 years after Satoshi started it all

Are Bitcoin‘s anniversary: ​​The very first Bitcoin block was mined 16 years ago today.

And the network is stronger than ever, with mining problems hitting a new all-time high as the largest cryptocurrency heads into the new year.

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

Hashing is the computer process of converting data into a fixed-length string of letters and numbers. In the Bitcoin mining world, powerful machines do this as quickly as they can so that new blocks can be added to the blockchain – which is just a long list of transactions.

Simply put, with the difficulty level harder than ever, the network is even more secure – just as the largest crypto network was always intended to be.

The first block of Bitcoin was mined on January 3, 2009. Known as the ‘Genesis block’, The pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, has created 50 BTC with this move.

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

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

Edited by Andrew Hayward