For example, with the help of a hashrate, which is nothing more than an indicator of the efficiency and performance of cryptocurrency mining devices. And this productivity is continuously growing.
Judge for yourself. Hashrate is measured in hashes per second (X/s) - that is, it shows the amount of conversion of one set of characters (at the input) to another in a second of time. At the same time, 1 kilohesh per second (Kx/s) = 1 thousand X/s; 1 megahesh per second (Mx/s) = 1 million X/s; 1 gigahesh per second (Gc/s) = 1 billion X/s; 1 terahesh per second (Tx/s) = 1 trillion X/s; 1 petahesh per second (Ph/s) = 1 quadrillion ; 1 hash per second (Eh/s) = 1 quintillion hashes per second X/s; 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s) - 1 sextillion X/s. Are the numbers really impressive and seem unattainable? It won't be for long.
Let's dive into history a little. The hashrate of Bitcoin reached 1 Tx/s in 2011. In 2013, it already amounted to 1 Ph/s, in 2016 - 1 Eh/s, and in November 2020 it grew to an incomprehensible 140 Eh/s. And at the same time, there is no magic - only technology.
The hashrate of the network is directly dependent on the number and type of devices used for mining, that is, it is directly proportional to the profitability of the miner. The higher its hashrate, the higher the block mining speed, and hence the chance to receive a reward for its creation.
It all started with working on PC processors, then they were replaced by farms of video cards. The turning point was the appearance of ASIC miners - after that, the hashrate of the network and the complexity of mining began to increase at lightning speed in absolute values. But not everything is so simple and unambiguous. For example, the relative percentage growth of hashrate continues to slow down for several years, and this is quite understandable. Mining of cryptocurrencies, and first of all of course bitcoin, has reached a huge industrial scale and requires huge costs to support the existing hashrate, not to mention its further development. Blockchains with a block mining mechanism based on the POW algorithm are in an absolutely similar position.
Thus, the hashrate is the designation of the unit of power used for mining devices. And by power in this context, we mean the speed of solving a cryptographic problem, for which it is necessary to perform thousands and thousands of small individual operations. And the hashrate figure shows how many such computational actions can be implemented by mining equipment in a second of time.
And in order to increase this very power (and hence profit), mining pools already known to us come into play - groups of miners who combine their capabilities to solve cryptographic problems of different blockchains more quickly. And still, even after coordinating their efforts, they must carry out not only a lot of technical, but also analytical work to determine the so-called advantageous level of computing power.
