How Does the PoW Difficulty Adjustment Mechanism Work?

The difficulty adjustment mechanism automatically increases or decreases the complexity of the mining puzzle to ensure that the average time between blocks remains constant (e.g. 10 minutes for Bitcoin).

If blocks are being found too quickly (due to increased hash rate), the difficulty increases. If they are found too slowly (due to decreased hash rate), the difficulty decreases.

This maintains a predictable issuance schedule.