The mining difficulty of the Bitcoin (BTC) network, which reflects the computing challenge of adding new blocks to the blockchain, has seen a slight increase to 148.2 trillion in the most recent adjustment of 2025, with more increases anticipated in January 2026.
The upcoming Bitcoin difficulty adjustment is expected on January 8, 2026, at block height 931,392, which may boost the mining difficulty to 149 trillion, as reported by CoinWarz.
As of now, average block times are around 9.95 minutes, slightly under the 10-minute target, indicating that difficulty may rise to normalize block times.
In 2025, mining difficulty reached unprecedented levels, experiencing significant spikes in September during Bitcoin’s price surge, prior to the dramatic market downturn in October.
Increasing mining difficulty means miners will need to allocate more computational and energy resources to remain competitive, adding to the challenges faced by operators in this capital-intensive sector.
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The difficulty adjustment safeguards network decentralization and Bitcoin’s valuation
The mining difficulty of the Bitcoin network ensures that blocks are mined neither too quickly nor too slowly by adjusting the challenge of successfully mining blocks and incorporating them into the decentralized monetary ledger.
Difficulty is recalibrated every 2016 blocks, approximately every two weeks, responding to the average block time. If miners are adding blocks too rapidly, the difficulty will increase to aim for a ten-minute average, and conversely.
This dynamic adjustment of difficulty ensures that no single miner can dominate the network by suddenly deploying more mining rigs or contributing an excessive amount of computational power in a brief time, thus maintaining decentralization.
A 51% attack could happen if an individual miner or a coalition of miners gains control over the majority of the network’s computing power, leading to centralization, double-spending, and a failure of Bitcoin’s foundational value proposition, which would greatly affect the asset’s price.
Even in the absence of a 51% attack, a miner with significant computing resources could quickly mine blocks, securing all block rewards and flooding the market with BTC, which would create substantial selling pressure and lower Bitcoin’s price.
By dynamically adjusting the mining difficulty in relation to the total computing power on the Bitcoin network, the protocol remains decentralized and safeguards Bitcoin’s valuation through a consistent supply schedule.
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