<p>If the difficulty were unchanged from its original target of 1, today there would be 16 trillion blocks mined every 10 minutes. </p>

<p>This would break the network instantly, it would not be able to maintain consensus, and would be creating something in the order of 33,000,000 gigabytes of blocks per hour, which would exceed all storage available in the world and consume all of the available internet bandwidth. </p>

<p>Suffice to say, this wouldn’t be ideal. </p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-05-14T11:01:59.303Z
Exactly. To word it slightly differently, if the ratio of difficulty to total network power was very small, new blocks would be added to the blockchain very rapidly. As total network power increases, so does the difficulty, to keep average mining time of one block close to 10 minutes. It also works the other way around.
Hubert Jasieniecki
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-05-13T17:46:23.680Z
2020-05-14T15:33:40.497Z
2020-05-14T15:33:40.497Z
Claris
<p>Could Bitcoin have a fixed difficulty, how to implement that for a test and what would that mean in terms of mining? Would there be a difference if mining with a big rig or just a wallet?</p>

<mining-theory><difficulty>
Could Bitcoin have a fixed difficulty?
Zetal
# Could Bitcoin have a fixed difficulty?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-05-13)

Could Bitcoin have a fixed difficulty, how to implement that for a test and what would that mean in terms of mining? Would there be a difference if mining with a big rig or just a wallet?

**Tags:** mining-theory, difficulty


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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2020-05-13. Score: 5

If the difficulty were unchanged from its original target of 1, today there would be 16 trillion blocks mined every 10 minutes.

This would break the network instantly, it would not be able to maintain consensus, and would be creating something in the order of 33,000,000 gigabytes of blocks per hour, which would exceed all storage available in the world and consume all of the available internet bandwidth.

Suffice to say, this wouldn’t be ideal.

> **Comments:**
> **username_2**: Exactly. To word it slightly differently, if the ratio of difficulty to total network power was very small, new blocks would be added to the blockchain very rapidly. As total network power increases, so does the difficulty, to keep average mining time of one block close to 10 minutes. It also works the other way around.  

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