BITCOIN DIFFICULTY ROSE 5.54% AT BLOCK 973,728 — HIGHEST SINCE NOVEMBER 2025 — STILL 4.88% UNDER THE RECORD SET A YEAR EARLIER

At block 973,728, mined at 19:14:58 UTC on October 29, 2026, bitcoin’s difficulty rose 5.54% to 148.36 trillion. That’s the highest since the retarget of November 27, 2025, and 4.88% under the record 155.97 trillion set at block 921,312 on October 29, 2025.

No one announced it. Every node did the same sum from two timestamps. Block 971,712 is stamped 1792154251 and block 973,727 is stamped 1793300370, 1,146,119 seconds apart. Two weeks is 1,209,600 seconds. Divide two weeks by the real gap and you get 1.05539, and the old difficulty times that is the new one. mempool.space and blockstream.info show the same 148,364,561,003,867.4 for block 973,728, and your own node will too.

The reason is speed. Those 2,015 gaps averaged 568.8 seconds, about 9 minutes 29 seconds a block. Across the last two periods, 4,032 blocks and 12,600 new bitcoin in subsidy came in 26.5 days, not 28. The retarget is what drags issuance back to schedule, and it did it twice in a row: plus 5.92% on October 16 and plus 5.54% now. Two rises over 5% back to back last happened in February 2024.

It doesn’t say who added the machines, and it doesn’t need to. The rule only counts time. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $77,757.