Hash Rate

In cryptocurrency mining, a hash rate, also known as hash per second or hash power, is used to measure a miner's performance.

What Is a Hash Rate?

It is the speed at which a computer is processing the Bitcoin code. The greater the HR, the more Bitcoin units you will be able to mine. Mining is the process of recording and verifying information in a digital register known as the blockchain. An ordinary home laptop is not suitable for mining – you will need a powerful computer that can process trillions of hashes per second. During the calculation of the Bitcoin network HR, an average of the last 10 minutes is used, because it takes about 10 minutes to mine or solve each block.

Cryptocurrency mining involves finding blocks via complex computations. The blocks are like mathematical puzzles (SHA 256 algorithms), which the mining machine has to guess by making millions of guesses per second. As the miners are mining the block, they generate text strings that are processed by the SHA 256 algorithm and converted into hashes.

To efficiently mine a block, the miner should hash the block’s header in such a way that it is lower than or equal to the target or hash. The difficulty of the hash varies with each change. To arrive at a given hash, the miner has to change some of the block’s headers, which is known as a nonce. Each nonce begins with “0” and increases every time to get the required hash. The chance of getting this hash is quite low because the miner has to change the nonce many times. The number of these change attempts per second is known as the hash rate.

Measuring the Hash Rate

The Hash Rate is measured in hashes per second (h/s). Some of the common terms are mega, giga, and tera depending on the number of hashes.

• Kilohash (KH/s) = 1,000 h/s.

• Megahash (MH/s) = one million h/s or 1,000 KH/s.

• Gigahash (GH/s) = one billion h/s or one million kH/s.

• Terrahash (TH/s) = one trillion h/s or one million MH/s.

• Petahash (PH/s) = one quadrillion h/s or one billion MH/s.

• Exahash (EH/s) = one quintillion h/s or one trillion MH/s.

The number of hashes varies depending on the computer and cryptocurrency that is being mined. For example, an HR of a bitcoin mining machine is different from that of ethereum. The HR of the Bitcoin network is now 50 TH / s and is only growing because more and more miners are joining the network. As a result, it becomes more and more difficult to mine bitcoin.

How the Hash Rate Impacts the Miner’s Reward

Currently, a bitcoin mining computer such as ASIC has mining power of approximately 12 TH / s. As a result, this device can produce 0.318 BTC per year. However, when calculating the miner’s reward, it is necessary to consider electricity costs pertaining to the mining equipment. The more difficult it is to mine a cryptocurrency, the higher the electricity costs and this has a negative impact on the profit. The correlation between the electricity costs and yielded reward is known as the miner’s efficiency.

Summary

A hash rate is a unit used to measure the performance and efficiency of cryptocurrency miners. The HR is measured in hashes per second. For example, the HR of the Bitcoin network is now 50 terahashes per second and is growing because more and more miners are joining the network, which makes the process of bitcoin mining even more complex.