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Mining 101: Hashrate & Difficulty | Lundquist Digital Mining

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.

  • 1 H/s = 1 hash (guess) per second
  • 1 TH/s (terahash) = 1 trillion hashes per second
  • 1 EH/s (exahash) = 1 million terahashes 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 miner: 100 TH/s
  • Network: 600 EH/s = 600,000,000 TH/s

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:

  • The “target” is more strict
  • Your miner must get “luckier” to find a block
  • On average, each block takes more total hashes to find

Why Does Difficulty Exist?

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

  • Old days: CPUs → slow
  • Then GPUs → much faster
  • Now ASICs → insanely fast

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

  • If blocks were too fast → difficulty increases
  • If blocks were too slow → difficulty decreases

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:

  • How many BTC you earn per TH/s
  • How often the network finds blocks overall
  • Your share of total rewards at that specific difficulty

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:

  • Your efficiency (J/TH)
  • Your electricity rate
  • How difficulty trends over time

Difficulty vs Bitcoin Price

Difficulty and price can move in different ways:

  • Price can go up while difficulty stays flat
  • Difficulty can go up even if price is flat
  • Sometimes both rise or fall together

As a miner, you care about:

  • BTC earned per day (affected by difficulty)
  • USD price of BTC
  • Your power costs

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:

  • USB miner: maybe 0.01 TH/s (or less)
  • Modern ASIC: often 100+ TH/s
  • Network: hundreds of EH/s

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:

  • Realistic expectations about solo mining
  • Using pools for consistent payouts
  • Understanding odds instead of believing marketing hype

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

Putting It All Together

Hashrate:

  • How many guesses your miner makes per second
  • Higher hashrate = more chances to earn

Difficulty:

  • How hard it is to find a valid block
  • Adjusts every ~2 weeks to keep blocks ~10 minutes apart
  • Higher difficulty = less BTC per TH/s

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: