do you know what “hashrate” is?

The hashrate has a major importance in bitcoin mining. It is the power used that is necessary to validate a block on the blockchain.

We often hear about “hashrate” when talking about bitcoin miners. But do you know what it is exactly? The “hashrate” (or hash rate in French) refers to the total computing power (of all participants in the network) necessary to validate the new blocks of a chain on a network, at a specific time. For bitcoin, it is the total calculation that is necessary to register a new block on the blockchain.

Miners compete to find the solution to a complex equation as quickly as possible in order to create a block (which will validate a certain number of transactions). The fastest then wins the right to create the block and obtains a certain number of bitcoins as a reward. So it is important to have this high computing capacity. This “hashrate” also makes it possible to assess the level of competitiveness of miners, their cost, and therefore their profitability.

The “hashrate” is a value expressed in hashes per second (h/s) or terahash (1,000 billion) per second (TH/s). This “hash” represents a calculation performed. According to data available on Blockchain.com, this rate was 586.4 million TH/s on June 12. This is an estimate because there is no precise measurement of this rate.

With the bitcoin halving which took place on April 20, 2024, the miner reward was reduced to 3,125 BTC. This event takes place approximately every four years and more precisely every 210,000 blocks validated on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a halving of the number of bitcoins issued on the market to reward miners.

The difficulty of mining multiplied by 52 in 7 years

On the Blockchain.com graph, we notice that the hashrate increased exponentially from 2017, when the price of bitcoin exceeded the base of 10,000 dollars for the first time, on December 6, 2017. At the time, this rate was 11.66 million TH/s for a bitcoin price of $10,588. Since then, we have observed that the total computing power used by bitcoin miners has never stopped growing. On June 12, for a bitcoin at $69,655, the hashrate was 604.99 million TH/s. In almost seven years, the total computing power necessary to mine a block has therefore multiplied by almost 52 times on the network.

Note that only on blockchains that operate on a “proof of work” protocol does the “hashrate” exist. For bitcoin, it is up to miners to validate blocks by responding to increasingly complex equations, particularly due to halving.

You should also know that the higher the hashrate level, the more important the security of the network. In fact, this makes an attack on this network by a malicious entity increasingly complex.