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Ah ok, I just looked it up on Wikipedia and understand why I was confused and where the corrections are coming from as well. > Every 2,016 blocks (approximatel

Ah ok, I just looked it up on Wikipedia and understand why I was confused and where the corrections are coming from as well. > Every 2,016 blocks (approximately 14 days given roughly 10 minutes per block), nodes deterministically adjust the difficulty target based on the recent rate of block generation, with the aim of keeping the average time between new blocks at ten minutes. So the changes are made at somewhat predictable paces, in this case roughly every 14 minutes, but the difficulty is adjusted based on demand. In other words, it's a little of both. Demand though will definitely affect the difficulty of the problems, but the demand is only updated every 2,016 blocks.

ashtonkem 5y ago
> but the difficulty is adjusted based on demand Only indirectly. More precisely the difficulty is based on supply of hashing power. If more people hash, the blocks will be minted faster and the difficulty will be adjusted higher at the next re-adjustment. It doesn't really matter if those blocks are actually full or empty, and in fact the system would continue to work if most of the blocks were empty and the trading happened off the chain in exchanges. I say indirectly because the amount of hashing power on the chain at any given moment is driven by the expected reward per block minted. Nobody wants to run thirsty machines if the cost of electricity exceeds the expected rewards for successfully minting a block. So the number of machines online and is directly proportional to the value of bitcoin, which is driven by consumer demand.