- What does the term "difficulty" in mining mean, and why is there difficulty in mining?
Hey OP
Zaguru12 provided you all the necessary explanations.
I just want to add this link :
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/DifficultyIt is the Bitcoin Wiki, which is (in my opinion) the best source of information about the basic concepts of Bitcoin, and Bitcoin mining.
For example, about the difficulty concept :
What is "difficulty"?
Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a hash below a given target.
The Bitcoin network has a global block difficulty. Valid blocks must have a hash below this target. Mining pools also have a pool-specific share difficulty setting a lower limit for shares.
How often does the network difficulty change?
Every 2016 blocks.
What is the formula for difficulty?
difficulty = difficulty_1_target / current_target
(target is a 256 bit number)
difficulty_1_target can be different for various ways to measure difficulty. Traditionally, it represents a hash where the leading 32 bits are zero and the rest are one (this is known as "pool difficulty" or "pdiff"). The Bitcoin protocol represents targets as a custom floating point type with limited precision; as a result, Bitcoin clients often approximate difficulty based on this (this is known as "bdiff").
Otherwise, I can recommand you to read Mastering Bitcoin which is free on Github.
This book is a great source of info, and will give you deeper explanations about technical stuff related to Bitcoin.
Link of Mastering Bitcoin on github :
https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook