Hash Rate or Hash Power

Hash Rate, also Hash Power, is the measuring unit that measures how much power the Bitcoin network is consuming to be continuously functional. By continuously functional I mean how much hash power is it consuming to generate/find blocks at the normal mean time of 10 minutes.

If you remember, in my previous article What is a Bitcoin hash I explained thoroughly that the Bitcoin network consumes a lot of energy because it has to solve mathematical intensive computations regularly to find the blocks.

These computations for finding the blocks are basically mathematical puzzles that a miner cannot just guess without a lot of computation.

To successfully mine a block, a miner needs to hash the block’s header in such a way that it is less than or equal to the “target.”

The target, at the time of writing this article, is that the SHA-256 hash of a block’s header must be a 256-bit alphanumeric string, and must start with 18 zeros. The target changes as the difficulty change every 2016 blocks.

And the miners arrive at this particular hash (or target) by varying a small portion of the block’s headers, which is called a “nonce.” A nonce always starts with “0” and is incremented every time for obtaining the required hash (or target).

Since the varying of the nonce is hit and miss, the chances of getting this particular hash (or target), which starts with these many zeros, is very low. Therefore, many attempts must be made by a miner by varying the nonce.

And this number of attempts made per second is called hash rate or hash power. And this hash power or guessing attempts are made by miners who mine the Bitcoin blocks by a process called Bitcoin mining.

To understand more about hash power see this short video on hash power or hash rate which perfectly explains it.