If you have looked at anything related to Bitcoin mining, you have seen numbers like 200 TH/s or 1,000 EH/s. Hashrate is the single most important number in mining: it measures how much work a miner, or the entire network, is doing. Here is what it means, how the units fit together, and why your share of it is what really counts.
Key takeaways
- Hashrate is the number of guesses (hashes) a miner makes per second while trying to find the next Bitcoin block.
- The units climb by a factor of 1,000: TH/s (trillions), PH/s (quadrillions), EH/s (quintillions), ZH/s (sextillions).
- The Bitcoin network as a whole runs at around 1 ZH/s, a level it first reached in 2025.
- What matters for a miner is not raw hashrate but its share of the network's total.
What is a hash?
A hash is the output of a mathematical function that turns any input into a fixed-length fingerprint. Bitcoin uses a function called SHA-256. Feed it a block header and it returns 64 hexadecimal characters that look completely random. Change one character of the input and the output changes beyond recognition.
As we explain in What Is Bitcoin Mining?, miners are looking for a hash below a target number set by the network. There is no way to aim: you tweak the input, hash it, check the result, and try again. Each try is one hash.
Hashrate is simply how many of those tries a machine makes every second.
The units, from H/s to ZH/s
Because modern hashrates are astronomically large, they are written with metric prefixes, each one 1,000 times the previous:
| Unit | Hashes per second | Typical example |
|---|---|---|
| kH/s (kilo) | 1,000 | A laptop processor, roughly |
| MH/s (mega) | 1 million | Early GPU mining, around 2010 |
| GH/s (giga) | 1 billion | The first ASIC miners, 2013 |
| TH/s (tera) | 1 trillion | One modern ASIC delivers a few hundred |
| PH/s (peta) | 1 quadrillion | A row of machines in a mining farm |
| EH/s (exa) | 1 quintillion | A large mining pool |
| ZH/s (zetta) | 1 sextillion | The whole Bitcoin network today |
- One trillion hashes every second
- 1 TH/s
- One trillion hashes every second
- TH/s in one ZH/s
- 1,000,000,000
- TH/s in one ZH/s
- Network hashrate, first reached in 2025
- ~1 ZH/s
- Network hashrate, first reached in 2025
When you rent hashrate on FastBTCMining, it is measured in TH/s, the same unit used to rate a single ASIC miner.
Why the network's hashrate matters
The total hashrate of the network is the combined speed of every miner on Earth. It tells you two things.
How secure Bitcoin is. To rewrite past transactions, an attacker would need to out-hash everyone else combined. The higher the network hashrate, the more absurdly expensive that becomes.
How competitive mining is. One block is found roughly every 10 minutes, no matter how many miners compete for it. If the network's hashrate doubles, each individual miner's chance of winning any given block halves. The network compensates with the difficulty adjustment, which keeps the 10-minute rhythm steady.
Network hashrate is an estimate
Nobody can see every machine. Explorers estimate the network's hashrate from how quickly blocks are found compared with the current difficulty, which is why figures from different sources vary slightly and jump around day to day.
Your share is what counts
Mining is a proportional game. Over time, a miner can expect to earn rewards in proportion to its share of the total hashrate:
Your share = your hashrate ÷ the network's hashrate
For example, 100 TH/s against a network of 1 ZH/s is a share of one ten-millionth. That sounds tiny, and it is, but the network produces around 144 blocks a day, each worth 3.125 BTC plus fees. A tiny share of a very large, steady flow is what every miner, large or small, actually earns. Pools turn that share into frequent small payouts instead of a rare jackpot, as we explain in Mining Pools Explained.
That share is not fixed. If the network grows while your hashrate stays the same, your share shrinks. That is why miners track the network's hashrate as closely as the price of Bitcoin.
Hashrate versus efficiency
Two machines with the same hashrate can have very different electricity bills. That is why the industry rates miners on efficiency, measured in joules per terahash (J/TH): how much energy it takes to produce one trillion hashes. The lower, the better. A 2016-era Antminer S9 needed close to 100 J/TH. Today's best air-cooled machines are near 11 J/TH. We dig into what drives that progress in Inside an ASIC Miner.
You will also see the term hashprice, the revenue one unit of hashrate earns per day, usually quoted in dollars per PH/s per day. It folds the block reward, fees, difficulty and the price of Bitcoin into a single number, and it moves every day.
Frequently asked questions
What does TH/s mean?
Terahashes per second: one trillion SHA-256 calculations every second. It is the standard unit for the speed of a single Bitcoin mining machine and for rented cloud hashrate.
Is a higher hashrate always better?
For the same cost, yes: more hashrate means a larger share of the network. But hashrate on its own ignores cost. A fast machine that burns too much electricity can earn less than a slower, more efficient one.
Why does the network's hashrate keep going up?
Because more efficient machines keep being produced and deployed, and because mining has grown into an industry with access to cheap power. Network hashrate can also drop temporarily, for example when miners switch off during extreme weather or when older machines are retired.
This article is for general information only and is not financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Mining rewards depend on network difficulty, block rewards and the price of Bitcoin, and are not guaranteed.
