What Is the “Difficulty Adjustment” in Bitcoin Mining?

The difficulty adjustment is a mechanism in the Bitcoin protocol that automatically recalibrates the complexity of the mining puzzle. This adjustment occurs every 2,016 blocks, which is approximately every two weeks.

Its purpose is to maintain a consistent average block time of roughly 10 minutes, regardless of changes in the total computational power (hash rate) of the network. If the hash rate increases, the difficulty increases, and vice versa.