Every two weeks the bitcoin protocol measures how quickly the last two thousand blocks arrived and resets the difficulty so that the next ones arrive ten minutes apart. It is one of the few automatic stabilizers in any market, and the size of each adjustment is a clean read on how much capacity came on or went off in the fortnight before it.
133.8T
Difficulty from 20 March 2026
−7.8%
Change at this adjustment
145.0T
Previous setting
961EH/s
Hashrate at the adjustment
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Bitcoin mining difficulty
At each two-week adjustment.
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
The subsidy runs down on a schedule
The block subsidy halves roughly every four years and is written into the protocol. Everything else about the security budget is a market outcome, but that part is a known arithmetic decline. The open question, and it has been open for a decade, is whether transaction fees grow into the gap or whether the budget simply gets smaller.
How this was measured
- Hashrate, difficulty and per-block reward and fee averages are mempool.space daily series. Dollar figures apply the Coinbase daily close on the same date and assume the protocol’s target of 144 blocks a day, so a day that produced more or fewer blocks is smoothed. Rewards are the total paid to miners, subsidy plus fees, in satoshis per block; the fee share divides one by the other. Hashrate is a statistical estimate inferred from block times and difficulty rather than a measurement, and single-day readings are noisy for that reason, which is why the charts run long. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before.
