Network Hashrate
Total computational power
- Source
- mempool.space
What this measures
Hashrate estimates the total computing power dedicated to Bitcoin mining, expressed in exahashes per second (EH/s, a billion billion calculations every second). The higher it is, the more expensive an attack on the network becomes, which makes it a direct proxy for security. It also reflects miner confidence: operators only switch on hardware they expect to pay for itself.
An estimate, not a measurement
No one can count the calculations performed by miners around the world. Hashrate is inferred from two public figures: the network difficulty and the pace at which blocks are found. When blocks arrive faster than the 10-minute target, more power has come online.
Because finding a block is partly a matter of chance, the estimate swings sharply from one day to the next. A steep drop over 24 hours does not mean miners have left the network. The trend over several weeks is what counts, read alongside difficulty, which is recalibrated every 2,016 blocks, roughly every 2 weeks.
What hashrate says about Bitcoin’s security
To rewrite recent blocks or censor transactions, an attacker would need to control a majority of this power. Even then, they could not create bitcoin outside the rules or spend someone else’s coins: nodes would reject those blocks. Hashrate sets the price of an attack, not the rules of the system.
Its history also records the shocks the network has absorbed. In 2021, China’s ban on mining cut hashrate by roughly half within a few weeks. Blocks kept coming, difficulty adjusted and the machines were plugged back in elsewhere, notably in the United States, which accounted for nearly 38% of hashrate in early 2022 according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.
The April 2024 halving was a different kind of test, an economic one. By cutting the block reward from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, it slashed miner revenue overnight without causing a lasting decline in hashrate. Hashprice shows what that competition costs each machine.
A high hashrate does not guarantee decentralization, though. This power is coordinated by a handful of mining pools, which decide which transactions go into blocks. That is where the real sensitivity lies: Bitcoin’s security is measured in exahashes, but its resistance to censorship is better read in the distribution of pools.