Why are the halvings occurring less than every 4 years?

Business & Management
#1

Once every 10 minutes, the bitcoin mining algorithm attempts to locate new blocks. The time it takes to locate blocks will decrease as more miners join the network and add more hashing power. To reestablish a 10-minute objective, the mining difficulty, or how tough it is for a computer to solve the mining algorithm, is adjusted once every two weeks or so. As the bitcoin network has grown exponentially over the past decade, the average time to find a block has consistently been below 10 minutes (roughly 9.5 minutes).