Bitcoin mining is harder than ever – 16 years after Satoshi started it all

is it. BitcoinBirthday: The first bitcoin block was mined 16 years ago today.

And the network is stronger than ever, with mining difficulty reaching a new all-time high as the biggest cryptocurrency rides into the new year.

Data from Bitinfocharts It shows As of Monday, Bitcoin's hashrate hit a new all-time high of 109.78 trillion hashes—the highest ever seen for the first blockchain network. That means it takes that much hash to generate a new block.

Hashing It is the process of converting data into a fixed length string of letters and numbers. In the world of Bitcoin mining, powerful machines do this as quickly as possible so that new blocks can be added to the blockchain – this is a long list of transactions.

Simply put, with the difficulty level now more difficult than ever, the network is more secure – as always intended for a great crypto network.

The first block of Bitcoin was mined on January 3, 2009 “Genesis Ban” Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, created 50 BTC in his move.

Since then, 877,665 blocks have been mined and added to the network's long ledger. In blockchain, blocks contain information on transactions. Only miners can add data to the network and the difficulty level helps prevent unauthorized additions or edits to the chain, as it takes an incredible amount of computing power to manage the network.

And Bitcoin's secret creator or creators can be happy with how resilient the network has been, given 16 years of increasing difficulty.

Edited by Andrew Hayward