Key Takeaways
- Hash price is the expected daily USD revenue per TH/s, allowing miners to estimate earnings based on their hardware and current market conditions.
- Calculated as total daily miner revenue (USD) divided by the total network hash rate, it varies with Bitcoin’s price, transaction fees, and overall network hash rate.
- Miners use hash price to assess profitability, compare rig efficiencies, inform operations, and estimate payback periods. Analysts use it to gauge the health of the mining sector.
- Despite Bitcoin price increases, hash price generally declines as the rising network hash rate (from more miners and efficient ASICs) dilutes earnings per unit of hash power.
Interest in Bitcoin mining has grown alongside Bitcoin’s ascent in value, with the price of the world’s flagship cryptocurrency regularly setting new all time highs. People from all walks of life have set up mining rigs, seeking to convert electricity into new BTC rewards. Yet, the environment around mining often feels like a maze of jargon, making it harder to join the conversation. Two metrics, hash price and the hash price index, clearly explain what miners truly earn and how to compare machines.
In this article, you’ll learn what hash price is, how it’s calculated, why it matters to Bitcoin miners, where to track it, and why it has generally declined despite rising Bitcoin prices.
What is Hash Price in Bitcoin?
Hash price is the amount of money a miner can expect to earn from a unit of computational power, usually measured in dollars per terahash per second per day ($/TH/s/day). In simpler terms, it tells you how much revenue a miner can generate from producing hashes. Behind the scenes, mining rigs run the SHA-256 algorithm to generate hashes, each one a fixed-length string that proves computational work. These hashes cost electricity to produce, and while most are discarded, a few may solve a block and earn BTC. Hash price captures the economic value of that entire process.
If you think about it, hash price answers the question: “If I deploy one terahash per second for 24 hours, how many dollars do I expect back?” When Bitcoin’s market price or transaction fees rise, the rewards (in USD) per hash climb. Conversely, finding a block becomes more challenging when the network’s total computing power grows, and hash price dips.
How Is Hash Price Calculated?
Hash Price = (Daily Miner Revenue) ÷ (Total Network Hash Rate)
- Daily Miner Revenue: Every day, roughly 144 blocks are added to Bitcoin’s ledger (one every 10 minutes). After the halving, each block paid 3.125 BTC, so about 450 BTC entered circulation daily. Multiply that by Bitcoin’s USD price to find total revenue for that day.
- Network Hash Rate: This estimates how many hashes are performed per second across all miners. Because no single source reveals every rig’s output, analysts use the difficulty rate (a number that shifts every 2,016 blocks) and actual block production to back into an estimate.
Divide those two, and you arrive at hash price. For example, if miners collectively earned $20.7 million in a day and ran 280 million TH/s, each 1 TH/s generated about $0.07 in revenue that day. Because Bitcoin’s price and the network hashrate constantly shift, hash price can swing daily.
Why Is Bitcoin Hash Price Important?
As a miner, you want to know how much value each mining rig adds or subtracts relative to its electricity draw. Hash price lets you compare different machines side by side.
- Profit Estimates: Multiply your rig’s TH/s rating by the current hash price to see potential daily revenue. If the hash price is $0.10/TH/s/day and you run 100 TH/s, that’s $10 a day in gross revenue.
- Rig Efficiency: Two rigs might each do 100 TH/s, but one might consume 3 kW while the other consumes 5 kW. By looking at revenue per kilowatt-hour (REV/kWh), you can see which machine efficiently turns electricity into dollars. Hash price is the starting point for that calculation.
This single metric helps miners decide which rigs to power up, when to pause operations, or how long it might take to recoup hardware costs. Analysts and investors use hash price, too, to forecast sector profitability and plan expansions.
What Is the Hash Price Index?
The hash price index is a historical chart that tracks how hash price changes over time. It shows trends such as when hash price rises or falls, and by how much. Platforms like Hashrate Index compile this data, helping miners understand long-term patterns beyond daily rates.
Where to Track Hash Price
Several online tools gather mining metrics and present hash price in real time:
- Glassnode: A blockchain analytics platform offering charts for Bitcoin’s hash rate, hash price, and more. Their dashboards let you zoom into daily, weekly, or monthly views.
- Woobull: Known for clear visualizations of hash price, hashrate, and Bitcoin’s USD price on the same graph. This helps you see how those variables dance together.
- Hashrate Index: Provides a dedicated hash price index, updating values minute by minute. You can pull data via API if you’re building your own mining dashboard.
Why Has Bitcoin’s Hash Price Decreased Over Time?
You might think that as Bitcoin’s price increases, hash price would too. But that’s not how it works. While Bitcoin’s value has increased, hash price has mostly decreased. Why? Because more miners have joined the network, increasing the total hash rate. That means more competition, so each miner earns a smaller piece of the reward. The more hash power there is, the less each unit of it is worth.
More Miners
When new machines come online, the total network hash rate rises, and each miner’s share of rewards gets smaller. That’s what we’re seeing now. As of May 2025, the network’s 7-day average hash rate dropped to 859 EH/s, but recent difficulty rose to 121.66T. Even with Bitcoin hitting over $107,000, hash price has stayed flat at around $55.17 per PH/s/day. More competition means each unit of hash power earns less, especially as more efficient rigs enter the race.
More Advanced Technology
Back in Bitcoin’s early days, hobbyists mined with CPUs and GPUs. Reds and greens on video cards whirled in home offices; rooms smelled faintly of solder and warm PCBs. But by 2014, ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) swept in. These custom-built machines focused entirely on hashing, churning out hundreds of GH/s or TH/s at much lower joules per hash.
That created a twofold effect:
- Higher Entry Costs: Top-tier ASIC models, like Bitmain’s S19 series, can cost thousands of dollars per unit, which is not affordable for everyone.
- Greater Power Draw: An S19 might knock out 140 TH/s, but it’s sipping around 3 kW. It’s more efficient, but electricity costs can quickly wipe out margins if the hash price is low.
Those shifts squeezed smaller miners using older hardware. Even as Bitcoin’s USD price climbed, the sheer efficiency of ASIC fleets, often running at industrial scale, kept pushing hash rate upward, nudging hash price downward. Over time, the dollar value you get per TH/s/day declined, despite BTC gains.
Closing Thoughts
Hash price boils down to this simple idea: a daily revenue metric per unit of computing power. But beneath that number lies a tale of shifting competition, evolving machines, and shifting BTC prices. By checking hash price and following the hash price index, miners see more clearly which rigs make sense, when to power off, and how to compare different generations of hardware.
So, next time you peer into a mining facility’s rows of lights and fans, you’ll know that each terahash carries a specific dollar value. You’ll sense how network-wide changes ripple through your own returns. And you’ll appreciate why a metric, just a few numbers in a chart, matters to anyone turning electricity into Bitcoin rewards.
