The Self-Correcting Lottery
Bitcoin was designed to produce one new block roughly every ten minutes. If more miners join the network, blocks would start coming faster. If miners leave, blocks would come slower. Either outcome would be bad — faster blocks destabilize the issuance schedule, slower blocks delay every transaction.
The fix is called difficulty adjustment. Every 2,016 blocks (roughly every two weeks), the network looks at how quickly those blocks were found and adjusts the difficulty target up or down so that the next 2,016 blocks will average ten minutes each.
How It Works in Practice
- Blocks came in faster than 10 minutes → difficulty rises (hashes have to hit a smaller number)
- Blocks came in slower than 10 minutes → difficulty falls (hashes can hit a larger number)
The adjustment is capped at 4x up or 4x down in a single epoch, so the network cannot swing too violently.
Difficulty only ever adjusts to match the hash rate. It does not decide rewards directly — but it decides how many rewards your share of the hash rate will capture over time.
Why It Matters For You
When network hash rate grows, each individual terahash earns slightly less because the same block reward is now split across more hashes. This is baked into the math of Bitcoin — it is a feature, not a bug, because it keeps the issuance schedule predictable.
Our Hedge
We account for expected difficulty drift when we price our plans. The daily rate you see on a plan card is calibrated for the plan's full duration, so you are not exposed to a sudden mid-plan rate cut. The only thing we cannot hedge is the market price of the coin itself — see our Risk Disclaimer for details.