getdifficulty

getdifficulty returns the current Bitcoin Proof-of-Work difficulty as a single floating-point number — how much harder it is to mine a block now than at the network's easiest setting. Bitcoin retargets this value about every 2,016 blocks so that, regardless of how much hashpower is chasing the BTC block reward, blocks keep landing roughly every ten minutes. Call it at https://bitcoin.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY with no parameters to read the figure.

Use cases

• Display the current Bitcoin mining difficulty on a status or explorer page.
• Track how difficulty changes across each ~2,016-block retarget period.
• Estimate network security trends over time as difficulty rises or falls.

Parameters

Este método não aceita parâmetros. Passe um array vazio [].

Response

Example request

1curl https://bitcoin.therpc.io/YOUR_API_KEY \
2  -X POST \
3  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
4  -d '{
5  "jsonrpc": "1.0",
6  "id": "therpc",
7  "method": "getdifficulty",
8  "params": []
9}'

Errors & troubleshooting

Common pitfalls

• Difficulty is a relative multiple of the genesis target, not an absolute count of hashes — to estimate the network's actual hashrate, use getnetworkhashps instead.

Supported networks

• Mainnet
• Testnet

See also

• getmininginfo
• getnetworkhashps
• getblockchaininfo