Mining Stats
Bitcoin's mining difficulty retargets every 2016 blocks (~2 weeks) so that blocks arrive every 10 minutes on average, no matter how much compute is on the network. This page shows the full history since 2009: difficulty has risen from 1 to 127.5 trillion (a factor of ~127,450,789,715,843), and the hashrate sits at around 836 EH/s. Six metrics are switchable: difficulty, hashrate, hash price, blocks/day, attack cost per hour and energy value. Difficulty and hashrate live in our own database and come from our own Bitcoin node, which indexes the whole chain since 2009 (failover: mempool.space); the price for the derived values comes from our database too. This page is purely descriptive and contains no forecast.
History since 2009
Pick the metric. Difficulty, hashrate, hash price, attack cost and energy value use a logarithmic axis (they span many orders of magnitude); blocks/day is linear around the 144 target.
Difficulty & hashrate from 2009; hash price and attack cost from 2010 (price data starts then).
Methodology & data
Frequently asked questions
01What is mining difficulty?
A measure of how hard it is to find a valid block. The network retargets it every 2016 blocks (~2 weeks) so a block appears every 10 minutes on average. Since 2009 it has risen from 1 to 127.5 trillion.
02What is the hashrate?
The total compute of all miners, measured in hashes per second. Currently around 836 EH/s (quintillions of hashes per second). It is estimated from difficulty and actual block times.
03What does hash price mean?
The daily revenue that 1 TH/s of compute earns on average (block subsidy × 144 blocks × price ÷ network hashrate, excluding transaction fees). It trends down long-term because hashrate grows faster than price and subsidy. At every halving it halves again.
04What does blocks per day mean?
How many blocks per day were actually found. The target is 144 (one every ~10 minutes). Computed from the real time between two difficulty adjustments (2016 blocks ÷ days between). Above 144 means blocks came faster than target (compute has grown), below means slower.
05What is the attack cost per hour?
A rough model of what it would cost to muster as much compute as the whole network for one hour: the basis for a theoretical 51% attack. Estimated from hashrate and price (the same simplified formula as the dashboard). The higher the value, the more expensive an attack, i.e. the more secure the network. Read it as a ballpark rather than an exact figure.
06What does the energy value (MWh per bitcoin) mean?
The energy spent to produce one bitcoin. It is given in megawatt-hours (MWh), an amount of energy, not megawatts (MW, which is power). Important: this is the whole network's consumption per newly mined bitcoin, not a single miner's and not per transaction. Example: ~930 MWh = ~930,000 kWh is roughly the annual electricity of ~300 households. Computed at today's ASIC efficiency (~18 J/TH); older hardware was less efficient.
07Where does the data come from?
Difficulty and hashrate live in our own database and come from our own Bitcoin node (via our mempool instance), which indexes the whole chain since 2009; only if the node is unreachable do we fall back to public mempool.space. The Bitcoin price for hash price and attack cost is from our own price database. The energy value uses an efficiency assumption of ~18 J/TH (today's ASIC hardware); historically the real draw was higher.
08Is this a forecast or financial advice?
No. This page only shows historical values. Past developments need not repeat. Not financial advice.