Hashrate

Hashrate measures how many hash calculations a machine, a pool or an entire network performs each second. For Bitcoin it is usually expressed in exahashes per second (EH/s), where one exahash equals a quintillion hashes. Network hashrate is estimated from how quickly blocks are found relative to the current difficulty.

A higher hashrate makes a proof-of-work chain harder to attack, because an attacker would need to control more than half of it to rewrite recent blocks. It also reflects how much capital miners are committing: hashrate tends to climb when prices are high and can fall when mining becomes unprofitable, for example after a halving.

Analysts watch total hashrate and how it is split among pools to gauge network security and mining concentration.