Bitcoin Difficulty Barely Moved: What the Numbers Mean

On October 3, 2026, at block 969,696, Bitcoin's mining difficulty retargeted down by 0.03% to 132.72 trillion, the smallest move of the year. The bitcoin difficulty adjustment runs every 2,016 blocks, about two weeks, and compares how long those blocks took against a target of 10 minutes each. This time the two numbers almost matched: a 0.03% cut means the epoch's blocks averaged a fraction of a second slower than 10 minutes.

A flat retarget is a story in itself. The figures below come from Bitcoin.com's mining desk, which drew its revenue numbers from Newhedge data, and they are worth reading slowly before you decide what they mean for a rig at home.

The Number: A 0.03% Bitcoin Difficulty Adjustment

A 0.03% retarget sits close to a rounding error. You can turn difficulty into the hashrate it implies: multiply 132.72 trillion by 2 to the power of 32 and divide by 600 seconds, and you get about 950 exahashes per second (EH/s). Published estimates of live hashrate run a little higher and stay below 1,000 EH/s. When a large miner goes dark or a wave of new machines plugs in, a retarget usually moves several percentage points. This one says the network's average hashing power over the last two weeks matched the two weeks before.

The year as a whole tells a different story. Bitcoin has logged 19 adjustments in 2026, eight up and eleven down, for a net decline of 11.96% since January. The next retarget is expected around October 18, and blocks were arriving a little slow, at about 10 minutes 48 seconds, when the report went out.

How to Read the Next Retarget Yourself

You can estimate the next adjustment from one public number, the average block time since the last retarget. The rule divides the target, 600 seconds, by the observed average. If blocks kept arriving every 10 minutes 48 seconds, or 648 seconds, for the whole epoch, difficulty would fall by roughly 7% (600 divided by 648 is about 0.926). The protocol also caps any single move at a factor of four in either direction, so even a sudden collapse in hashrate cannot cut difficulty by more than 75% in one step.

Treat early readings with care. A few days into an epoch, a handful of slow or fast blocks swings the average a lot, and the 10:48 figure was a reading taken shortly after the October 3 retarget. By the last few hundred blocks the average settles and the estimate becomes useful. Any block explorer that shows "time since last retarget" and "blocks remaining" gives you both inputs.

For your own rig, the 0.03% changes nothing. Difficulty sets the odds at every pool, NexusPool included, and a quiet retarget neither loosens nor tightens them.

What $1.12 Billion in September Mining Revenue Means

Miners earned about $1.12 billion in September 2026, the best month since January's $1.15 billion. Hashprice, the daily value of one petahash per second of work, hovered around $40 for most of the month, between a 30-day low of $37.45 and a high of $41.51.

That is the industry's haul, and it does not split into small pieces for small rigs. A one-person Bitaxe setup earns nothing for as long as it takes to find a block, and the full reward for that block the day it finds one. Hashprice tells you how the mining business is doing. It tells a home solo miner close to nothing about when a block will come.

Solo Mining Odds for a Home Rig at Today's Difficulty

Difficulty is the input that sets an individual rig's chance of finding a block, so do the math instead of guessing. At 132.72 trillion, the network needs about 5.7 x 10^23 hashes on average to find one block. Divide that by your hashrate and you get your expected wait.

Rig (hashrate)	Share of implied network hashrate (950 EH/s)	Chance per block	Expected solo wait
Bitaxe Gamma (1.2 TH/s)	1 in 792 million	~1.26 x 10^-9	~15,050 years
NerdQAxe++ (6 TH/s)	1 in 158 million	~6.32 x 10^-9	~3,010 years
NerdOctaxe Gamma (8 TH/s)	1 in 119 million	~8.42 x 10^-9	~2,260 years

Each wait divides the hashes per block by the rig's hashrate and converts seconds to years. These are averages, not schedules. A block can arrive on the first day or never, and some solo miners have found one far sooner than their math suggested. That chance is the whole appeal and the whole risk. Nothing here is investment advice.

Why a Flat Difficulty Doesn't Change Your Odds

A 0.03% retarget reassures you in one narrow way: the table above will still hold next week. It does not make a find more likely this month than last, and it does not reward patience. Difficulty is the same for every miner pointed at the same chain, through NexusPool's technology or anyone else's, because the network sets it, not a pool.

What you can check is your own setup. NexusPool's Payout Preflight tool shows the coinbase transaction that would pay your address on the current block, before anyone finds it, built by the same code that would build a real block. It won't tell you when you'll find one. It shows what happens when you do: the full reward lands at your own address, with 0% taken by the pool, because no pool-held balance sits between a found block and the miner who found it.

A 0% fee and a direct-to-address coinbase don't make a block arrive sooner. NexusPool's Glass Ledger, the signed hourly receipt the pool issues for the shares it counted from your rig, does not change the table either. It shows you what the pool saw from your hardware in a given hour, checkable against a key NexusPool publishes, and nothing more.

Keep the 0.03% and the $1.12 billion apart. One measures how steady the network's hashing power stayed, the other how the industrial side of mining did in September. Your odds come from your hashrate and the network's difficulty, and you now have both numbers.

Trust nothing. Verify what your own hashrate means against today's difficulty before you mine solo.