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Basic moments:
- What is hashrate?
- How is hashrate calculated?
- What does hashrate depend on?
- How to find out the mining hashrate of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
- Why does the hashrate of a video card show differently?
- What affects hashrate?
For those familiar with mining, the word hashrate comes as no surprise . Beginners immediately turn to Google for clarification. After reading the article, there should be no questions left about what it is, why it is needed, how to measure and count.
What is hashrate?
Explained in simple words , this is a unit of measurement through which the computing power of devices that mine cryptocurrency is determined. There are several types of mining, which is described in detail in our article. If the token supports POW mining , then you can set up equipment that “mines” this coin. To calculate the amount of cryptocurrency that can be received, XP is needed. Going deeper, it is important to note that the parameter indicates the speed at which the device performs mathematical operations, be it an ASIC or a “farm” of video cards. The main task is to find hash functions that will serve as the completion of a block in the chain. For this, a reward is given in the form of a set number of tokens. The higher the Hashrate of the system, the greater the chances of finding the desired block and collecting the reward. This is the main reason why private miners do not mine cryptocurrency individually, but join together in “pools” . Having found the correct solution earlier than others, the resulting “prize” is divided in direct proportion among all participants in the pool, depending on the computing power used by each.
Bitcoin: BTC network hashrate jumps 8 times
The total computing power of the Bitcoin network, according to blockchain.com, at the end of last week once again updated its historical maximum, reaching 79,752 EH/s.
The blockchain of the first cryptocurrency now has eight times the amount of computing resources compared to what it was at the market peak in December 2020, when BTC was trading at $20,000.
Over the past few months, the hashrate of the BTC network has been growing at a steady pace, periodically showing noticeable leaps, writes coinspot. Previous records were recorded at the end of June and beginning of July, when the amount of computing power on the blockchain reached 65 EH/s and 70 EH/s, respectively.
The growth of the hashrate reflects the dynamics of the strengthening of the Bitcoin platform. At the same time, the dynamics of a decrease in transaction fees are recorded, despite the continued volatility of the coin.
According to trader Filb Filb, the price of Bitcoin over the coming year will influence the behavior of miners, especially after the May halving in 2020, when the reward for mining a block will be halved from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC.
At the beginning of the month, the British company Argo Blockchain found that the profitability of digital money mining increased by 101% compared to May. According to experts, further growth and an increase in mining efficiency are expected in the third quarter.
In other news. The German Central Bank is against regulators interfering in the development of the Libra cryptocurrency project. According to the Central Bank, digital currencies are an essential condition for the innovative development of the global economy.
Meanwhile, member of the British Parliament and well-known Facebook critic Damian Collins proposed an investigation into the company's cryptocurrency project.
New research from analytics firm Messari confirms that cryptocurrency does not play a major role in illicit financial activity around the world. According to Messari's findings, for every $1 in BTC spent on the darknet, $800 in fiat currency is laundered.
According to the latest SSRS study, 4% of Americans have chosen Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as their best long-term investment option. Crypto assets are most popular among young people.
“Bitcoin is slowly sliding towards the important round level of $10K. It seems that now all market participants are waiting for new market signals. A decline below the $10K level could trigger increased sales. In this case, it is worth paying attention to the dynamics of BTC near $9,450, which is now passing through the 50-day moving average, which served as support earlier in July,” notes the FxPro analyst team.
The basics of Forex trading are described in detail on the FxPro website.
FxTeam Analytics on Telegram – read news and analytics first!
On topic: 08/14/2020 Declining Bitcoin dominance: positive or negative? 08/14/2020 Authorities will begin monitoring transactions with cryptocurrencies 08/13/2020 Kraken predicts Bitcoin will soar by 200% in the near future 08/13/2020 Bit comment: The crypto market has returned to growth 08/12/2020 Bit comment: Bitcoin has pushed off from 11,000. Will they buy it or not?
How is hashrate calculated?
Without parsing the principle into small blocks, the miner receives an array of raw data . Afterwards, the process of selecting the correct value starts, taking into account the specified rules. It may look different depending on what hashing algorithm is used. The result is a set of characters. For example, 128 bit MD5 looks like this 79054025255fb1a26e4bc422aef54eb4. Depending on the power of the element, the pace of hash search can vary hundreds of times. Specialized ASIC miners . They are developed specifically for such tasks. Considering that modern technology can sort through hundreds of thousands and millions of hashes per second, in order not to get confused by zeros, they use various prefixes :
- kilohash kH – 1000 h/s
- megahash – MH – 1 million
- gigahash – GH – 1 billion h/s
- terahesh – NH – 1 000 000 000 000 (12 zeros) h/s
- petahesh – PH – 1 000 000 000 000 000 (15 zeros) h/s
The two largest pools belong to Bitmain
Bitcoin block mining statistics showed that over the past week, the BTC.com pool mined 27.3% of them, and AntPool generated another 15.6%, for a total of 42.9%. Both pools belong to ]Bitmain[/anchor].
Also, each of the pools has capacity that they spend not on Bitcoin, but on Bitcoin Cash. But both cryptocurrencies use the same algorithm, which allows you to switch between them without any problems.
Antpool controls 14.6% of the Bitcoin Cash network, and BTC.com accounts for 14.1%, in total they mine 28.7% of BCH blocks. The caveat is that Bitcoin Cash has a significantly lower mining difficulty than BTC, which is why switching power will give about 5% additional Bitcoin hashrate. If you add up these numbers, it turns out that both pools owned by Bitmain can now control about 48%. This can give the company the opportunity to have a significant impact on the industry.
But this does not mean that Bitmain will certainly take advantage of this opportunity; moreover, the remaining pools already generate a total of more than 51% of the hashrate.
This state of affairs has developed due to the fall in cryptocurrency prices. Many small farms have become unprofitable due to the increasing difficulty of production and falling prices. Their owners lost the opportunity to cover the costs of electricity and equipment upgrades, which is why they began to curtail their capacities. Bitmain is in a better position due to its own hardware production and likely access to cheap electricity. Therefore, they capture the share of hashrate that is “freed” from leaving miners.
What does hashrate depend on?
In addition to SHA25 hashing, which is used in Bitcoin, altcoins use alternative hash functions for encryption. For this reason, the speed of search is different . A number of cryptocurrencies may use the same algorithm, which is absolutely normal. So, in addition to Bitcoin, SHA256 is embedded in Emercoin, Peercoin, Bitcoin Cash and others. Ethereum runs on Ethash, and with it this function is available in less popular Ubiq, Metaverse ETP, etc. The Litecoin network implements Scrypt.
Thus, using, for example, a “farm” for mining alts, with hash functions different from each other, the hash of the video card will be different.
What is Ethereum Difficulty
The emission of Ethereum, like most other cryptocurrencies, is strictly limited. Moreover, the algorithm provides for the release of a strictly defined number of coins
for a specific period. Miners receive issued ether for calculating valid hashes - signatures of data blocks in the blockchain. If the difficulty of mining Ethereum were constant, with an increase in the number of miners and, accordingly, the computing power of mining, all coins would be mined in a short period. Therefore, when accelerating mining, the Ethereum algorithm automatically increases or decreases the complexity of calculating keys so that the speed of closing blocks remains within specified limits.
On the Ethereum network, difficulty determines the time required to validate a hash. The ratio of this indicator and the cost of ETH determines how profitable it is to mine ether.
How to find out the mining hashrate of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies?
The Internet is full of services with a user-friendly interface, where you can see not only the hashrate, but also the expected profitability from “digging” a specific coin on the selected hardware. You can easily find them by searching for “mining calculator” in the search engine. On the site, just check the boxes next to the video cards, processors, ASICs that are in stock and indicate their quantity. To accurately calculate your profit, you should fill in the field with approximate energy costs. This way you can estimate your net income. Those who have a “zero socket” do not pay for electricity; the cost field for electricians is left empty. In this case, the payback of the video card and the profitability of mining increases significantly. Sometimes instead of the h/s indicator you can see the inscription sol/s .
This means “solution”. When working with the Equihash hash function, which is used in the popular Zcash, Komodo, ZenCash and others, it is customary to count the number of “solutions” per second that the device can sort through. Hence the reduction. There are many assumptions floating around the Internet that sol/s is twice the h/s, but in reality they are equivalent. They demonstrate the same thing, which has been repeatedly confirmed by authoritative sources. It just so happens that the speed of the Equihash hash function is measured in “sols”, so don’t be embarrassed if you see this. The prefixes are the same: kSol, MSol, etc.
Bitcoin mining difficulty. Relationship with hashrate
Bitcoin blocks
Another important indicator for miners is the difficulty of the Bitcoin network - a parameter that reflects how labor-intensive the task of performing the mathematical calculations required to find a new block and receive a reward in the form of BTC coins is.
Difficulty is a dynamic characteristic that is inextricably linked to hashrate. The thing is that fluctuations in the total network power lead to changes in the time it takes to find new blocks, which ideally should be 10 minutes.
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In order to prevent a significant acceleration or slowdown in the rate of Bitcoin emission, every 2020 blocks (about once every two weeks) the system adjusts the difficulty value in the desired direction.
If you look at the graph of this indicator, for example, over the last year and a half, you will notice that it completely repeats the changes in hashrate.
Bitcoin network difficulty and hashrate charts (2018–2019)
Thus, the Bitcoin network self-regulates, preventing imbalance between the number of capacities connected to it, the complexity of computing operations and the profitability of mining.
For example, if the price of Bitcoin drops to levels at which coin mining becomes unprofitable, some miners are disconnected from the network. At the same time, the Bitcoin hashrate drops, the difficulty also decreases proportionally, and the remaining participants in the network begin to receive a reward of a size that motivates them to continue their activities. As soon as the exchange rate increases significantly, the number of miners will begin to increase again, causing an increase in computing power and complexity.
Both of these indicators, compared with the price of Bitcoin, are the main parameters that are used when assessing the energy efficiency and profitability of the equipment used for mining.
We talked about what will happen to mining in 2020 and to the hashrate of the main cryptocurrency in one of our videos:
Bitcoin Mining 2020. Earnings. Does it make sense to mine?
Why does the hashrate of a video card show differently?
The most productive devices for mining, ASICs, are manufactured by companies according to uniform drawings. Parts can be purchased from different suppliers, but all devices are unified and do not differ from each other. For this reason, when analyzing how many hashes, for example, in ASIC9 for Bitcoin mining, the indicators will remain the same. When buying a video card of a specific model , everything is a little more complicated. There are two largest graphics chip manufacturers, Nvidia and AMD . They supply crystals to a number of companies that market the final product, video cards. We take a specific model R9, which is sold under the brands ASUS, SAPHIRE, ASUS and others. In addition to the main computational component, other components of the map also affect the speed of hash enumeration. For example, a memory chip . The most popular ones, with which the video camera can show the best performance, are Samsung. If the cards have Hynix memory, its Hashrate may be several Mh lower. Unfortunately, it is often impossible to check without connecting it to a computer and a specialized program. Manufacturers try to indicate the hashrate of the video card depending on the algorithm, but these are approximate data. They may differ markedly from actual ones . And yet, by analyzing them, you can at least discard clearly unprofitable options. It’s better to double-check the rest in mining calculators.
Video card hashrate
The best video card manufacturers and market monopolists are considered to be 2 companies, AMD and Nvidea, with the majority of miners giving preference to AMD.
In these videos you can learn what to do if the hashrate on your video card jumps and jumps, and how to get out of a drop in hashrate.
Below is a brief overview of the most popular video card models that currently work with the Equihash algorithm. It is considered optimal in terms of the ratio of power costs and mining profitability.
The video talks about the Zcash (ZEC, based on Equihash) hashrate on AMD.
Nvidia GE Force GTX 1050 Ti
Appearance.
This is a gaming video card, which has an inexpensive price (from 10,000 rubles, can be found for 8,000 rubles) and a good hashrate (from 10 Mh\s). The video processor uses Pascal architecture and the GP107 core from Samsung. The regular version has a memory capacity of 2 GB, which is not enough for mining. The titanium version has a memory of 4 GB, and this is the optimal indicator.
Comparison with previous models.
Miners should pay attention to the heat dissipation indicator, here the TDP is 75 Watts at maximum load. In terms of performance, this video card is better than the GeForce GTX 960, and it heats up much less. You need to buy a 300 W power supply.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Ti
Appearance.
This video card costs from 15,000 rubles, options cost from 9,000 to 12,000 rubles. usually second hand. The minimum hashrate is from 20 MH/s; with proper mining, it pays off in about 120-140 days.
Comparison with the previous model.
The titanium model has 6 GB of memory.
This video shows overclocking for ETH mining and explains the features of the Ethereum hashrate.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070
Appearance.
The price of the video card is approximately 23,500 rubles, hashrate from 27 MH/s, pays for itself in 180-190 days at best.
View from above.
This is primarily a gaming video card, which has good graphics core frequencies (up to 1.8 GHz).
Comparison with the previous model.
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
Costs over $1,000 and pays for itself in about 14-18 months. It has a memory of 11 GB and requires a power supply of 600 W.
Appearance.
Side view.
View inside the building.
Comparison with related models.
The table shows the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti hashrate for different algorithms.
Table.
AMD Radeon RX 570
Appearance.
The video card costs from RUB 11,700 and has a hashrate of 24 MH/s. Without taking into account energy costs, it pays for itself in an average of 140-180 days.
Features a large memory capacity (8 GB).
In this video you can see the hashrate for Monero.
