> the effort required to mine Bitcoin increases over time. Not necessarily. The effort required is based on trying to create blocks every 10 minutes. If the pr

> the effort required to mine Bitcoin increases over time. Not necessarily. The effort required is based on trying to create blocks every 10 minutes. If the price increases, mining becomes more profitable, thus more effort will be put into mining, which means the blocks will start to be created quicker, leading to an increase in difficulty. The reverse is also true: if blocks take too long, the difficulty decreases. If you take a look at a difficulty graph [0] you can see that it decreases at times. Compare with a price graph [1]. You can see that significant price decreases also cause minor difficulty decreases, but it's not a 1:1 correlation due to mining efficiency improvements. [0] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-difficulty.html#log https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-difficulty.html... [1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-price.html#log https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-price.html#log