Bitcoin's Self-Punishing Difficulty Adjustment: A Two-Weekly Cycle

Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment is a complex process that occurs every two weeks. During this time, the network adjusts its mining difficulty to ensure it remains on track to meet its target block time of ten minutes.

The difficulty adjustment is designed to prevent miners from becoming too powerful and dominating the network. If miners were able to mine blocks at an incredibly fast rate, they could potentially manipulate the network and create fake transactions.

To prevent this, the Bitcoin protocol uses a mechanism called 'difficulty adjustment' or 'difficulty bomb.' This mechanism increases the difficulty of mining new blocks over time, making it more challenging for miners to validate transactions and add them to the blockchain.