Hash Power

Written by Ryan Watkins

Introduction

Hash power is the amount of cryptographic hashes performed per second by miners in the cryptocurrency mining process. Hash power is the primary measure of miner performance (and network security) in blockchains employing PoW. Using hash power we can determine how computationally intensive it would be to perform a 51% attack. However, it should be noted that this metric is only useful in evaluating the security of POW blockchains as not all blockchainsderive their security from computationally intensive hash functions.

In Bitcoin hash power represents the number of SHA-256 computations (cryptographic hashing algorithms can vary across chains) performed in one second across the Bitcoin network. While not a perfect measure of Bitcoins’ hash power at a given point in time, hash power can be calculated based on the amount of time between blocks and a blockchain’s difficulty level.

Suggested Reading

Explaining Hash Rate Or Hash Power In Cryptocurrencies by Sudhir Khatwani

What is Hash Rate by Jordan Tuwiner

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