The difficulty level of mining Bitcoin has surpassed 50bn for the first time, and continues to plateau. Bitcoin is mined using computer processing power, whereby computer's solve problems and are rewarded for their solving them with Bitcoin. However, the difficulty of solving these problems correlates with the total problem-solving power of the network, meaning the rate at which Bitcoin is mined generally slows over time, making the process of mining Bitcoin less profitable over time. In order to increase the profitability of mining, a new type of algorithm called SHA-256 was introduced in 2009.
The difficulty level of mining Bitcoin has surpassed 50bn for the first time, and continues to plateau. Bitcoin is mined using computer processing power, whereby computer's solve problems and are rewarded for their solving them with Bitcoin. However, the difficulty of solving these problems correlates with the total problem-solving power of the network, meaning the rate at which Bitcoin is mined generally slows over time, making the process of mining Bitcoin less profitable over time. A graph of the difficulty of mining Bitcoin over time can be found at the linked webpage.