Mining 101: Understanding Hashrate & Difficulty

Two words you’ll see everywhere in Bitcoin mining are hashrate and difficulty. If you understand these two concepts, almost everything else about mining starts to make sense.

What Is Hashrate?

Your miner is basically a machine that guesses numbers really fast. Each guess is called a hash. The hashrate is how many guesses it can make per second.

So if your miner is rated at 100 TH/s, that means it can try about 100,000,000,000,000 different guesses every second.

Total Network Hashrate

You’re not mining alone. Every miner on Earth is also guessing. All of those guesses together form the network hashrate.

Example:

Your share of the network is:

100 TH/s ÷ 600,000,000 TH/s = 1 / 6,000,000 of the total hashrate.

This tiny fraction is why solo mining with small hashrate is like winning the lottery.

What Is Difficulty?

Difficulty is how hard it is to find a valid block. It’s a number the Bitcoin network adjusts to keep blocks coming roughly every 10 minutes.

More hashrate on the network → difficulty goes up. Less hashrate on the network → difficulty goes down.

When difficulty is high, it means:

Why Does Difficulty Exist?

Without difficulty, faster hardware would make blocks come faster and faster:

Bitcoin solves this by automatically adjusting difficulty every 2016 blocks (~2 weeks):

This keeps the long-term average close to 1 block every 10 minutes.

How Difficulty Affects You as a Miner

Difficulty does NOT change your hashrate. Your miner still does the same number of guesses per second. What difficulty changes is:

Higher difficulty = fewer BTC earned per TH/s Lower difficulty = more BTC earned per TH/s

This is why long-term profitability depends heavily on:

Difficulty vs Bitcoin Price

Difficulty and price can move in different ways:

As a miner, you care about:

That’s why our tools separate:

Why a USB Miner Doesn’t “Compete” With a Modern ASIC

If you’ve seen people buy tiny “one-shot” or USB miners, here’s the reality:

Your chance of finding a block with 0.01 TH/s is effectively:

Like buying 1 lottery ticket while the rest of the world buys 10 billion.

This is why we emphasize:

Our tools like the Mining Profit Calculator and BTC Rewards Forecast make these odds visible in numbers.

Putting It All Together

Hashrate:

Difficulty:

You control hashrate and efficiency. The network controls difficulty. Your job is to make sure your setup still makes sense as difficulty changes.

Next Steps in Mining 101

From here, good next steps are: