According to the numbers, Bitcoin’s network difficulty increased by 5.97% with a block height of 917,280, taking the title of the third biggest increase this year.
Increased probability of Bitcoin mining
Blocks are now even harder to find, with the network difficulty increasing by 5.97% to 150.84 trillion.
Think of the Bitcoin network difficulty like the odds of winning a giant dice lottery that resets every 10 minutes. Back in January 2009, when difficulty remained at 1, targets were effectively wide open and miners only needed a few throws to win digital gold.
In 2025, the top five mining difficulties will increase.
Let’s fast forward to today. The difficulty level is 150.84 trillion, and miners now have to roll an average of 150.84 trillion times more dice to get a winning block than they did in the early days. The difficulty has been adjusted every 2,016 blocks, going down 5 times and up 15 times so far in 2025.
These upward shifts total +50.40% and the declines total -16.54%. After hashrate reached an all-time high, and with blocks mined faster than the 10-minute average of the last epoch, computational power remains above the 1 zetahash mark at 1,071.28 exahashes per second (EH/s).
However, blocks are currently being mined at a slower clip, with an average 24-hour clock-in of 10 minutes and 40 seconds. Earnings have been rising since September 28, when 1 petahash per second (PH/s) had a low of $48.53 and is now worth $50.66, with BTC trading at $120,337.
This is still less than the $54.13 per PH/s miners earned 30 days ago. For now, miners would welcome a decrease in difficulty along with stable price increases, but it remains to be seen whether that will actually happen.
All eyes are now on October 16, 2025, with the next retargeting determining whether Miner gets a break or faces even tougher odds.