Bitcoin’s ‘difficulty adjustment’ is perfectly analogous to the escapement mechanism found inside the clockwork of any timepiece.
It governs the chaotic production of all miner hash power to advance the ledger only in steady, measured ticks.
Not only is it the most ingenious and inspired aspect of engineering in the entire timechain, it’s also the reason why the PoW blockchain serves as the world’s first decentralized clock.
• What difficulty adjustment does: it modulates how hard it is to produce a block so that blocks keep arriving ~every 10 minutes even when the amount of mining power (energy) changes.
• What an escapement does: it releases gear teeth in measured increments, converting a messy, variable push from the mainspring into a steady, regular tick. It's the mechanism that forces irregular force to produce regular time.
Tick tock, next block.
