Monero Difficulty

What is Monero difficulty?

Monero mining difficulty determines how difficult it will be to mine the next block and this is why it is referred to as the difficulty of Monero mining.

Monero difficulty is a measure of how many hashes (statistically) must be generated to find a valid solution to solve the next Monero block and earn the mining reward.

As you can see in the Monero difficulty chart above, the Monero Difficulty makes adjustments often.

Furthermore, the mining difficulty also keeps the block generation in line with the set block time, or the amount of time that should statistically pass between each block.

As more hashing power is added to the Monero mining network, the difficulty must increase to ensure blocks are not being generated too quickly.

In order for the blocks to be generated consistently, the difficulty must be increased or decreased, this is called a difficulty re-target.

On a difficulty re-target block (every block or every number of blocks), the difficulty is increased if the previous blocks where generated faster than the specified block time and decreased if the previous blocks where generated slower than the specified block time.

All that said, given a constant hashrate, when the XMR mining difficulty increases you earn less mining rewards due to the overall increase in the total Monero network hashrate.

Given, the frequent changes in Monero difficulty adjustments up and down, use our Monero mining calculator to calculate Monero mining profits.