Bitcoin: complexity is still rising. What does this mean? And what does it entail?

Bitcoin is still increasing its complexity. And more and more computing power keeps coming in.
Bitcoin mining complexity is rising again, despite the fact that until at least a few weeks ago, the situation didn't seem to be one of calm for the industry's major miners. The indicator is interesting - and if Bitcoin worries you, but you have no idea what it means or what it signals, now is the time to pay attention to it.
What is changing in the world of Bitcoin mining? Is there really something that is not yet obvious? And what will the increased complexity entail?

Ideally Bitcoin should produce one block every 10 minutes

The idea of bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto was - and it remains unchanged to this day - that the bitcoin blockchain should produce one block every 10 minutes. Think of these blocks as a new transaction page to be added to the ledger. Miners compete to record this page, because each page added to the ledger is rewarded with 6.25 bitcoins and all the commissions that users pay for the transactions themselves. There is a clear economic advantage in this competition, which we will return to.

To add blockchain, you have to solve a kind of mathematical puzzle

The mainstream press usually talks about complex equations, but this is not the case. In fact, the calculations that need to be done to qualify to add a blockchain are very simple. The problem is that you have to do a lot of them. It's more like trial and error than problem solving. Billions of tries.
Without going into too much detail, imagine that you need to find a number that when multiplied by many other numbers in a block gives a certain number. A certain number is what mining computers try to find. And it takes many, many attempts to do that. Obviously, the more computers (and the faster they are) connected to the network, the easier it is to find that number.
Under normal circumstances-if the difficulty of finding that number were fixed-the more computers you add to the Bitcoin network, the faster you will find a solution that will give you the right to add the last block and earn newly created Bitcoins.
Since, as we saw above, the idea is to maintain an average interval of 10 minutes between each block, there is a complexity here that the protocol automatically adjusts every 2,016 blocks. And that's about every 2 weeks.

The complexity can be changed

If computers as a whole have gotten larger and/or have more processing power, blocks are on average less than 10 minutes.
The Bitcoin protocol therefore adjusts: it evaluates the average time in which the last 2,016 blocks have been added, and if it is more than 10 minutes, it reduces the complexity of the math puzzle. If not, it increases the complexity.