Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped by 0.74% at block 959616 this weekend, marking the 15th adjustment of 2026. In the first seven months, decreases outnumber increases by a ratio of 3 to 2. This self-regulation mechanism tells of an industry facing increasing pressure. Bitcoin difficulty functions like an automatic regulator: every 2,016 blocks, about every two weeks, the protocol recalibrates the target to maintain an average block time of ten minutes. This mechanism, unchanged since the network was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, is a reliable barometer of the computing power deployed by the network’s miners.