Here is a short quiz carried out by TheMinerMag which will keep bitcoin miners busy during the quiet times of the end-of-year holidays.
How is Hashprice calculated?
Measured in $/PH/s, the hashprice represents the daily revenue in dollars generated by the production of one PH/s.
Hashprice = (Quantity of bitcoins mined each day + transaction fees) x (Price of a bitcoin in dollars) / (Global hashrate in PH/s)
Which gives us dollars divided by PH/s ($/PH/s).
Its counterpart is the hashcost which gives the quantity of dollars it costs to produce a PH/s. It is expressed according to the efficiency of a company’s ASIC fleet and the cost of electricity.
Hashcost = (Average efficiency of the miner fleet in D/TH) x (cost of electricity in $/megaWh) x (24 hours)
Which also gives us by dimensional analysis dollars divided by PH/s ($/PH/s).
In short, its hashcost must be lower than the hashprice to be profitable.
The Hashrate?
Hashrate = (2³² hash) x (difficulty to mine) / (Block interval in seconds)
Mining difficulty is a number derived from the probability of finding a valid hash. It is adjusted every 2016 blocks (approximately every 2 weeks) in order to maintain an average interval of 10 minutes between blocks.
Dimensional analysis of the hashrate shows that we have hashes divided by seconds. Hence the expression of the hashrate in EH/s, or PH/s, etc.
EH = 1 Exahash = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 H
PH = 1 Petahash = 1,000,000,000,000,000 H
TH = 1 Terahash = 1,000,000,000,000
GH = 1 Gigahash = 1,000,000,000 H
MH = 1 Megahash = 1,000,000 H
1 EH/s = 1,000 PH/s = 1,000,000 TH/s = 10¹⁸ H/s
A state-of-the-art ASIC like Bitmain’s S21 displays 200 TH/s. It therefore takes 5,000 S21 miners to produce one EH/s. And therefore 2.5 million miners to produce the 500 EH/s that the Bitcoin network has just reached.
We cannot know exactly how many hashes are generated at any given time. The hashrate is calculated after the fact, based on the speed at which the blocks were found.
The Efficiency of an ASIC?
ASIC for application-specific integrated circuit. It’s a chip designed to do one thing. Which, in the case of miners, is to pass a block header through the SHA-256 algorithm. This results in a hash.
The goal of the miner is to try different headers (by varying a nounce) until finding a hash smaller than a target number. That is to say a hash starting with a certain number of 0s. The more zeros required, the more difficult the hash is to generate.
The efficiency of an ASIC represents the amount of energy (in joules) required to produce one terahash.
Efficiency = Watt/TH/s = (Watts x seconds) / TH = J/TH
The smaller the efficiency number, the better.
Example of ASIC efficiencies by year of launch:
2023 / S21: 17.5 J/TH
2021 / S19 XP: 21.5 J/TH
2020 / S19: 29.5 D/TH
2019 / S17: 39.5 J/TH
2018 / S15: 59 D/TH
2017 / R4: 97 J/TH
The efficiency and hashrate of a miner allows us to know its power (Power capacity). This metric measured in megawatts and often used to talk about the importance of an installation.
Power capacity = (Hashrate installed in EH/s) x (Average efficiency of the miner fleet in D/TH)
If a miner has 4 EH/s installed and the average efficiency of its fleet is 25 J/TH, then its power is 100 MW.
Large miner facilities can reach 1,000 megawatts (1 Gigawatt), like Riot’s in Corsicana, Texas. Such complexes are rare. They generally do not exceed 300 MW.
The “Realized Hashrate”?
This metric evaluates a miner’s performance, often over a month. If a company mines X bitcoins at least, its performance will be calculated this way:
Realized hashrate = (X bitcoins) x (the overall hashrate of the month studied) / (the bitcoin reward per block)
This then allows you to calculate the conversion rate of your hashrate, measured in%. That is to say the share of its miners having emotionally reported bitcoins.
Conversion rate = Realized hashrate / Installed hashrate
A rate above 100% means that the miner is performing better than average, and vice versa.
Here is the thread of TheMinerMag on which this article is based:
If this article interested you, you will certainly want to read this inventory of miners before the halving.
Maximize your Tremplin.io experience with our ‘Read to Earn’ program! For every article you read, earn points and access exclusive rewards. Sign up now and start earning benefits.
