Blockchain/Bitcoin for beginners 9: Bitcoin difficulty, target, BITS - all you need to know

In this video I break the somewhat confusing and mysterious question of how exactly the block difficulty is defined, represented and updated. There is a simplification/misconception that the requirement is just to find a hash with a required number of leading zeros in hex. This is not the case, it's a little more intricate than that.... I show some examples of real blocks - in particular focusing on the genesis block, and how import it is for initializing the difficulty of mining a block. I clarify the relationship between BITS (in the block header) difficulty, and the actual 256 hash target. Links Blockchain explorer https://www.smartbit.com.au/ Difficult history chart http://www.coindesk.com/data/bitcoin-... Hex converter http://www.binaryhexconverter.com/hex...