Cryptocurrencies
China’s Bitcoin Crackdown Sets Up Record Tweak to Mining Puzzle
- Biweekly difficulty adjustment expected to ease by 27%
- Time to mine a block had jumped to more than 20 minutes
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Bitcoin is poised to break a record Friday, but it has nothing to do with its price.
What will happen on that day is the roughly biweekly adjustment to the protocol’s difficulty level for processing blocks of transactions. The setting dictates how much computing power is needed to mine the digital currency at the target rate of one block every 10 minutes. And it’s expected to be unlike any change that’s been seen before.