Mining only appears always to increase as time goes on because Bitcoin is increasing in popularity, but the protocol itself doesn't mandate that at all. Like ik

Mining only appears always to increase as time goes on because Bitcoin is increasing in popularity, but the protocol itself doesn't mandate that at all. Like ikeboy said, difficulty is adjusted to keep the average time to find a new block at about 10 minutes. The network is perfectly content to let the rate stay still if no new computational power is added to the network. https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1&timespan=all&scale=1&address= https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?showDataPoints=fals... As you can see, the increase in hash rate has been stagnating for nearly a year at this point.