WHAT IS HASHRATE

 

Blockchain basics - What is hashrate?

NiceHash is a hashpower marketplace. People can sell their computer hashing power to the highest bidder. Hashpower can also be called hashrate. But what exactly is hashrate? Continue reading this article to learn more about hashrate.

Before explaining what hashrate is, you must understand how mining works. You can learn how mining works by reading this article. In short, miners periodically guess a number. If they guess the correct number, they are financially rewarded.

Hashrate is a component of Proof of Work consensus. Proof of Work assures a competitive system between multiple participants (miners) who, simply put, attach new transactions to the blockchain, therefore confirm the transactions.Basics

To attach a couple of transactions to the blockchain, a miner must first find a solution to a one-way function also called a hash function. Check an example of the SHA256 one-way function:

Message

Hash

The hash function is a brilliant way of hiding the input information behind the output information. Without knowing the input data (transactions), it is practically impossible to guess it from the output alone. Bitcoin protocol uses another string called a nonce (number only used once). This allows miners to manipulate the hash output until it matches the requirements.

What is hashrate?

Miners are guessing the nonce (number only used once) in order to guess a part of the output data specified by the network difficulty. By guessing the correct nonce, they will correctly guess the hash output of the transactions in the block.

The amount of guesses per second is known as hashrate.

So for example, 1000000 guesses per second corresponds to 1 MegaHash per second (MH/s). RTX 3090 hashes at around 115 MH/s on DaggerHashimoto (Ethash) algorithm. This is equal to 115000000 guesses per second!

The units of measuring can be different, depending on the difficulty of guessing (how long it takes to make a guess). Generally mining DaggerHashimoto algorithm makes guessing faster than mining KAWPOW algorithm. Therefore the hashrate of DaggerHashimoto is higher than on KAWPOW.

Model	DaggerHashimoto	KAWPOW	Autolykos
NVIDIA RTX 3090	120 MH/s	54 MH/s	260 MH/s
AMD RX 6700 XT	47 MH/s	22 MH/s	80 MH/s