Bitcoin Network Hashrate
What is hashrate?
Hashrate is the total number of hash attempts — guesses at a valid block — that all Bitcoin miners make each second. Mining is a guessing game: hardware runs SHA-256 over candidate block headers until one lands below the difficulty target. The unit here is EH/s (exahashes per second, 10¹⁸ hashes/s). More hashrate means the honest network finds blocks faster — until difficulty retargets to pull the pace back to one block every 600 seconds.
How hashrate is estimated
No one can measure hashrate directly — miners don't report their hashes anywhere. It is inferred from two things every node can see: the current difficulty, and how fast blocks are actually arriving.
window_estimate ≈ implied_hashrate × (blocks_found / blocks_expected)
· each 1 T of difficulty implies ≈ 7.16 EH/s at exactly 10-minute blocks
Difficulty × 2³² is the average number of hashes it takes to find one block. Divide by the 600-second target and you get the hashrate that would produce that pace. If blocks in a window arrived faster than expected, the estimate scales up proportionally; slower, it scales down. Because block discovery is random, short-window estimates are noisy — the chart above uses period averages for that reason.
Why it matters for miners
The block reward is fixed per block (currently 3.125 BTC subsidy plus fees), so mining revenue is a pie of fixed size shared across the whole network. Your expected share equals your hashrate divided by network hashrate. When network hashrate rises 10% and yours doesn't, your revenue per TH/s falls about 9% — the same machines, the same power bill, less BTC. That per-TH revenue is exactly what hashprice tracks, and it moves whenever hashrate, difficulty, fees, or price move.
FAQ
- What is EH/s?
- EH/s means exahashes per second — 10¹⁸ hash attempts every second. The ladder: 1 EH/s = 1,000 PH/s = 1,000,000 TH/s. One EH/s is roughly 5,000 modern machines at 200 TH/s each (approx. manufacturer spec).
- Why does the Bitcoin hashrate estimate jump around?
- Hashrate cannot be measured directly — it is inferred from how fast blocks arrive, and block discovery is random. Over short windows luck dominates: a run of fast blocks reads as a hashrate spike that never happened. Daily estimates can swing several percent on variance alone; multi-week averages are far more reliable.
- Does more hashrate make Bitcoin more secure?
- Yes, in one specific sense: rewriting recent blocks requires out-mining the rest of the network, so the more total hashrate, the more expensive a 51% attack becomes. It does not change how safe your own wallet keys are — it raises the cost of double-spending recent transactions.