Mining difficulty ensures new blocks appear roughly every 10 minutes, regardless of how many miners are competing. When miners join with more hashing power, blocks are found faster—so after 2016 blocks, the difficulty retargets upward, bringing block times back on average to 10 minutes.

This dynamic scaling is a cornerstone of proof-of-work. It’s akin to a treadmill that speeds up if you run too fast and slows down if you run too slow. The result is a relatively stable issuance schedule for new BTC, unaffected by short-term spikes or drops in mining power.