If you have ever been involved with cryptocurrency mining, you must have come across the term hashrate. Hashrate is a function of cryptocurrency mining which deals with the speed at which a mining operation is completed. Hashrate can simply be defined as the speed used by the mining hardware before completion of a mining operation. This simply means the speed at which the next block is found by a miner.
The Ethereum hashrate has recorded a steady growth, topping about 295 TH/s on August 9, 2018. This is the highest Hashrate ever recorded on the Ethereum network. Ethereum’s hashrate has declined in value from 276 TH/s to a low of 246 TH/s in just two weeks. This is by far the most significant decline in hashrate that Ethereum has witnessed in the past five months.
The reduction in the hashrate of Ethereum is a major cause for concern in the cryptocurrency community, especially for the miners. This reduction in the hashrate of Ethereum is clearly stating that the number of miners on the Ethereum network is dwindling and most miners still on the network are no longer making any profit or not as much as they usually do. This might have led to many of them shutting down their miners or better still focusing their mining resource on other coins.
The reduction of the ETH price during recent weeks and in hashrate can be interpreted as a negative balance for the ETH miners. If the drop in the price of Ethereum continues for long enough, only miners in regions with cheap electricity will be able to continue mining.
The unit which hashrate is measured by is known as hashes per second (h/s). Depending on the number of hashes, the terms Giga, Tera, and Mega are commonly used. Let’s say for examples, your mining hardware, has a speed of 100 hashes per second, this is simply telling you that your mining hardware is capable of making 100 guesses per seconds when it comes to solving a block.
