that it BitcoinBirthday: The first Bitcoin block was mined on this day 16 years ago.

The network is stronger than ever, with mining difficulty reaching a new all-time high as the largest cryptocurrency enters the new year.

Data from Bitinfocharts He appears Bitcoin difficulty reached a new all-time high of 109.78 trillion hashes as of Monday, an all-time high for the original blockchain network. This means that it takes a huge amount of hashing to mine a new block.

Retail It is a mathematical process for converting data into a fixed-length string of letters and numbers. In the world of Bitcoin mining, powerful machines do this as quickly as possible in order to add new blocks to the blockchain - which is just a long list of transactions.

Simply put, with the difficulty level now harder than ever, the network is more secure – just as the largest crypto network was always intended to be.

The first block of Bitcoin was mined on January 3, 2009. It is known as "configuration block" Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, minted 50 Bitcoins into existence with this move.

Since then, 877,665 blocks have been mined and added to the network's long ledger. In a blockchain, blocks contain data about transactions. Only miners can add data to the network, and the difficulty level helps prevent unauthorized additions or modifications to the chain, as it would take an incredible amount of computational power to take control of the network.

Bitcoin's mysterious creator or creators are likely happy with how robust the network is, given 16 years of increasing difficulty.

Modified by Andrew Hayward