21 BTCHashrate
In plain words
Hashrate is how many guesses per second all Bitcoin miners make together. More hashrate means more energy protecting the network.
Short definition
Total computing power of all miners, measured in hashes per second (EH/s).
How it is measured
Nobody reports their hashrate to the network. It is estimated from how fast blocks arrive at the current difficulty: hashrate ≈ difficulty × 2³² ÷ average block time in seconds. Short windows are noisy, so sites quote 1-day, 3-day or 7-day averages.
Pool shares of hashrate are estimated the same way, from the blocks each pool found over a window, usually a week.
See also
- MiningMining is the work that adds new blocks to Bitcoin. Miners run special computers (ASICs) that guess numbers; the winner of each round earns the block subsidy and the fees.
- Difficulty adjustmentEvery 2,016 blocks (about two weeks) Bitcoin makes mining harder or easier so that a block still arrives about every ten minutes on average.
- Proof of workProof of work is how Bitcoin decides who adds the next block: miners spend electricity on guessing, and a correct guess is easy for everyone to check but expensive to produce.
- Mining poolA mining pool combines the hashrate of many miners so they get small, regular payouts instead of waiting years for a whole block.
References
- mempool.space: hashrate and difficulty mempool.space
- Bitcoin Wiki: Difficulty en.bitcoin.it