Hashrate: what those TH/s numbers actually mean
Hashrate is the speed of the guessing game — and your share of it is your share of the rewards. The unit ladder from H/s to PH/s, the three places hashrate gets measured, and how to turn it into expected income.
The unit ladder
Hashrate is guesses per second in the block lottery. The units are a plain thousand-ladder, exactly like bytes:
A laptop CPU might do a few MH/s; a single GPU, tens to hundreds of MH/s on GPU-friendly algorithms; a modern Bitcoin ASIC, hundreds of TH/s. Network totals run from GH/s on small chains to hundreds of EH/s (10¹⁸) on Bitcoin.
Three different hashrates, three different meanings
- Network hashrate — everyone combined; determines how fast blocks arrive given difficulty. Usually an estimate derived from difficulty and block times.
- Pool hashrate — the share a single pool directs; ÷ network hashrate gives the pool's block-finding share (and, on many chains, its centralization number).
- Your (worker) hashrate — what your rigs report to the pool; your ÷ network is your expected revenue share.
Reading hashrate honestly
Hashrate numbers on dashboards are measurements with error bars: worker hashrate is reported (and often rounded optimistically), network hashrate is inferred. Sustained swings matter; hourly wiggles are noise. And for merge-mined chains, headline hashrate can include hash borrowed from a parent chain — inheritable, and revocable (see the AuxPoW lesson).
See it live on pow.family
Every project page's stat cards show network and pool hashrate with live sources; Analytics charts track them over time so the swings and their difficulty responses are visible in one place.