Hello fellow students!
I have a question about hash rate. Ivan had some concerns about hash rate was going down, because the amount of active miners been going down.
But as I understand there is a regulator built in the blockchain, that make the mathematic problem for mining a bitcoin easier, if the hash rate goes down and thus keep the rate up.
Anyone who can elaborate on this?
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bitcoin protocol have an internal function to retargeting the hashrate difficulty to goes up or down depending on total net hashrate, it will go hard or easy to fulfill the creation of a block every 10 minutes, this function retarget the difficulty every 2 weeks Or in the future blocks if the hashrate goes up or down in a very few period of time.
Lets say theres a total of 100 miners on the network doing all the calculations to create a new block + transacionts fees, every 10 minutes, if 40 miners goes offline, the protocol will notice the lack of hashrate to keep up with the targeted difficulty, so it will do some internal calculations to lower the difficulty in order to made possible to create a block every 10 minutes with only the others 60 miners.
If 100 miners join the network, will now be 160 miners, the function will do same internal calcs in order to rise the difficulty with the same objective in mind: keep the creation of a block every 10 minutes.
Check it here by yourself. I think from line 45 to 80 is the function that get the network hashrate and do the maths…
Please correct me anyone if im wrong…we are all here to learn 
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Very good answer, only one thing;
The difficulty is not based on the 2 week period, but on block height (the “number” of the block). It’s adjusted every 2016 blocks, based on these blocks (really 2015 blocks…). The goal is 1 block/10 min - adjusted ~2 weeks. 
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