BITCOIN DIFFICULTY ROSE 5.92% — THE THIRD-BIGGEST JUMP OF 2026 — EVERY MINER’S SHARE OF THE SAME 450 COINS A DAY SHRANK ABOUT 5.6%

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty rose 5.92% at block 971,712, at 8:37 AM ET on Friday, October 16. It’s now 140.58 trillion, the highest since March 5 and the third-biggest jump of 2026, after February’s 14.73% and June’s 7.15%. On October 15 we wrote that blocks were coming every 9.38 minutes and the pace pointed to 6.58%. The full two weeks averaged about 9.44 minutes, so it landed at 5.92%.

Here’s who pays. The network still makes 3.125 new bitcoin a block, about 450 a day. Every miner now needs 5.92% more hashing to win the same share, so each machine’s cut of those coins shrank about 5.6%. Keeping blocks at ten minutes now takes roughly 1,006 exahashes a second.

Miners’ stocks fell hard the same day. Riot lost 11.5%, CleanSpark 10.2% and Marathon 9.6%, while IBIT, BlackRock’s bitcoin fund, lost 0.9%. That’s the market. The difficulty is the bill, and it shows up every two weeks whatever the stock does.

Difficulty is still 9.9% under its record of 155.97 trillion from October 29, 2025. The first blocks of the new period point to another 1.83% rise around October 30, though that estimate moves with every block. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,388.