Hash Rate

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What Does Hash Rate Mean?

A hash rate in blockchain and cryptocurrency operations is defined as the number of hash operations done in a given amount of time, or the speed of a miner’s performance. The hash rate is an important factor in the logistics of cryptocurrency mining and blockchain operations, and something that is often evaluated and discussed in cryptocurrency communities.

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Techopedia Explains Hash Rate

One of the most common measurements of hash rate is called “hash per second” and represents the number of SHA-256 algorithms that are performed per second. SHA-256 is a hash algorithm that takes a block of information and converts it to a hash, in a system that is comparable to various types of compression systems. It can be thought of this way – as the miners are mining the block, they generate strings of text that the SHA-256 algorithm works on and converts into hashes. That condenses the information that represents the block. Then, by counting the number of times that SHA-256 hashes a string of data, one gets the hash rate.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.