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What is Hash Rate?

A hash rate is the measure of miner’s performance. In other words, it is the hash function’s output or it is the speed at which a miner solves the Bitcoin code. In the year 2014, the performance of miner was measured in Billions of hashes/s.

The higher hash rate means increased opportunity for cryptocurrency mining and receiving block reward. The hash/s is the measure of the efficiency of the miner in W/Ghash/s. Hash/s is also measured in J/Ghash (Joules per 1 Billion hashes).

Hash per second represents SHA-256 algorithms that are used per second, known as hash rate. It is SI derived unit that is symbolized as h/s.

Bitcoin’s Hash Rate

For Bitcoin network calculations, the hash rate uses hash/s. As a mining pool or miner relies on the solved block, so the whole network’s hash rate is calculated as per the time in between blocks. However, the hash rate network’s accurate measure is not taken at given point in time, so the measurements done after long is considered as indicative.

In January 2015, the hash rate of the network was approximately 300 quadrillion hashes/s or 300 Phash/s.

How is Hash Rate measured?

Hash rate or Hash power is measured in h/s (hashes per second) and following are a few denominations that are used to refer to the hash rate.

Denominations of Hash Rate

• 1 KH/s = 1,000 (one thousand) hashes per second

• 1 MH/s = 1,000,000 (one million) hashes per second

• 1 GH/s = 1,000,000,000 (one billion) hashes per second

• 1 TH/s = 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) hashes per second

• 1 PH/s = 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) hashes per second

• 1 EH/s = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one quintillion) hashes per second

A Few Common Hash Rate Conversions

• 1 MH/s = 1,000 kH/s

• 1 GH/s = 1,000 MH/s = 1,000,000 kH/s

• 1 TH/s = 1,000 GH/s = 1,000,000 MH/s = 1,000,000,000 kH/s

The relation between Miner’s Reward, Hash Rate, and Difficulty

- Hash rate, difficulty, and miner’s reward are related to each other in different ways. At the point of time, when the network of Bitcoin goes up, the hash rate will be more in order to mine blocks and miners can earn 12.5 BTC block reward and transaction fees too.

- When the difficulty of Bitcoin network increase owing to the more miners, the hash rate or hash power also increases (more computational power will be required to successfully solve a cryptographic problem).

- This correlation in between these are forced into Bitcoin to keep the average Bitcoin block time of 10 minutes.