How bitcoin price, network difficulty, transaction fees and the halving combine into hashprice, the income of one unit of hashrate.
Advanced
Two owners with the same machine at the same site earn the same amount on the same day. What that amount is, and why it changes, comes down to one figure: hashprice. This guide explains what goes into it.
Hashprice is what one unit of hashrate earns in one day. It is usually quoted in dollars per PH/s per day, and sometimes in BTC. It is the same for every miner on the network, before pool fees. Your machines' share of it depends only on how much hashrate they deliver.
About every ten minutes, the network adds a block. The miner or pool that finds it receives the block reward, which has two parts:
All the miners in the world share those rewards in proportion to their hashrate.
If more machines join the network, blocks would arrive faster than every ten minutes. To prevent that, the network adjusts the difficulty of the puzzle every 2,016 blocks, which is about every two weeks. More hashrate on the network means higher difficulty. Less means lower.
For an owner, difficulty is the size of the crowd. The rewards per day stay roughly the same, so when difficulty rises, each TH/s earns a little less bitcoin. Over the years difficulty has trended up, with drops along the way, because new and more efficient machines keep joining.
Every 210,000 blocks, about every four years, the subsidy is cut in half. This is the halving. On that day the bitcoin created per block drops by half, and so does most of the income of every miner in BTC terms. Fees are not affected.
The halving is known years ahead. It is the main reason efficiency matters: after a halving, the machines that need the most electricity per terahash are the first to stop being worth running.
| Input | When it rises | How it moves |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin price | Hashprice in dollars rises | Every day, set by the market |
| Network difficulty | Hashprice falls | About every two weeks |
| Transaction fees | Hashprice rises | Block by block, with network demand |
| Halving | Hashprice falls at each one | About every four years, on a known schedule |
In BTC terms, what one TH/s earns goes down over time, as difficulty rises and halvings pass. In dollar terms it also depends on the price of bitcoin, which has moved both ways. An owner who keeps the bitcoin and an owner who sells it each month read the same hashprice differently.
| You do not control | You do control |
|---|---|
| The price of bitcoin | The efficiency of the machines you buy |
| Network difficulty | The site, and so the electricity rate |
| Transaction fees | Whether you keep or sell what you mine |
| The halving schedule | When you add or replace machines |
Careful: Mining output depends on bitcoin's price, network difficulty and uptime, and is not guaranteed. Nothing here is investment advice.