Anyone may run a mining application from their PC or laptop in the early days of Bitcoin. The difficulty of the mining algorithm increased as the network grew larger and more people became interested in mining. This is because the coding for Bitcoin prioritizes finding a new block once every ten minutes, on average. 1 With more miners, the odds of someone solving the proper hash faster increase, hence the difficulty is increased to reclaim the 10-minute target. Consider what happens if tens of thousands, if not millions, more people join the network. That's a lot of energy-hungry new devices.