Difficulty Adjustment
How much difficulty moved at each retarget, every 2,016 blocks
Short ranges plot one point per block, about one every ten minutes. Longer ranges plot one point per day, computed from every block in that day. How it is computed depends on the chart: some average, some total the day up, some are a ratio of the day's sums, and each chart says which. Either way a brief spike inside a day is smoothed away.
Get this data
About this metric
Definition
Every 2,016 blocks, roughly every 2 weeks, Bitcoin measures how long those blocks took and resets difficulty so that the next 2,016 are expected to take two weeks. Expected, not guaranteed: block discovery is random and hash rate keeps moving, so an epoch routinely runs days early or late. Every node computes the same correction from the same rule. If miners leave, blocks come slower and the network makes itself easier. If they arrive, it makes itself harder. This is that correction, as a percentage.
How it is measured
The largest fall on record is 27.94%, at height 689,472 in the week of the 2021 mining ban in China. The largest rises are from 2010, when the network was small enough for one operator to move it. Rises and falls are coloured separately so the sign is readable at a glance.
Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology