Zcash Difficulty

What is Zcash difficulty?

Zcash 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 Zcash mining.

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

As you can see in the Zcash difficulty chart above, the Zcash 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 Zcash 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 ZEC mining difficulty increases you earn less mining rewards due to the overall increase in the total Zcash network hashrate.

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