₿REAKING: Jack Dorsey’s technology company @Blocks announced today a new ‘bitcoin faucet’ website https://t.co/sMRqQFut9G that goes live on April 6. The original in 2010, gave away five bitcoins to every site visitor promoting education, that would be $350,000 today.
To make @elonmusk's tweet tangible, here's a chart of the bitcoin network hashrate.
At 1.06 ZH/s miners around the world are producing more than 1 sextillion hashes per second in a race to find a hash below the network difficulty level so they can add a block to the ledger and get rewarded in bitcoin.
This is a race that is open for anyone to participate in, it's impossible to cheat, and this race is core to creating a fair distributed system that takes the power of money printing out of the hands of central bankers and politicians.
To ensure that the system doesn't go haywire when more computers join the network and start producing hashes, Satoshi introduced the difficulty adjustment. Roughly every two weeks the network looks at the average time it took to produce a block over that period and adjusts the difficulty target up and down accordingly. If more hash rate comes on line and blocks come in faster, the network makes it harder to mine. If blocks come in slower than the ten-minute target, the network adjusts and makes it easier to mine.
Proof of Work with a difficulty adjustment will be looked at as one of, if not the, greatest technical breakthrough of the 21st century.