Why you almost never find a block: mining difficulty explained
Your machine makes trillions of attempts per second, and still nothing. It is not broken: it is the difficulty. Here is what it measures, why it is so high, and how it adjusts itself.
Published 24 September 2026 · by Pixel
VideoThe topic on video
Why you never find a Bitcoin block (difficulty explained)On YouTube, in French with subtitles
1. Mining means drawing fingerprints at random
With each attempt, your machine computes a fingerprint (a hash): a 64-character number nobody can predict. To win the block, you need a fingerprint smaller than a limit set by the network, the target.
A small fingerprint is easy to spot: it starts with many zeros. Recent winning blocks start with 19 or 20 zeros, for example 00000000000000000000da5d…. Each extra zero makes it 16 times rarer.
2. Difficulty is the number of attempts needed
132.8 T (trillion)about 570 thousand billion billionone block roughly every 10 minutesone block every 15,000 years or so, on averageThat is why you “never” find a block: it is not impossible, it is extremely rare. Every attempt has the same tiny chance, like a lottery ticket drawn every fraction of a second.
3. It adjusts itself
Every 2016 blocks (about two weeks), the network compares the time actually taken with the planned 10 minutes per block. If blocks came too fast, difficulty goes up; too slow, it goes down. That keeps Bitcoin’s pace steady, however many machines are plugged in worldwide.
What it means for you: the more hashrate on the network, the higher the difficulty, and the smaller your share.
4. And your “best share”?
The pool asks for much easier fingerprints than the target, called shares, to measure your work. Your best share is the best fingerprint your machine has ever found, expressed as a difficulty.
A block needs 132.8 T. If your best share reaches that, you have found a block. Until then, it shows how close you came: on findmyblock.xyz it is shown for each machine.
5. Going further
The calculator on the home page uses the current difficulty to estimate your odds. For the money question: How much does a Bitaxe earn?
Network figures as of 24 September 2026.
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