Hashprice: what your hashrate is worth, in one number

What is hashprice?

Hashprice is what one unit of hashrate earns in a day, in money. It is the only figure that lets you compare a coin with itself last month, or with another coin today.

Hashrate alone says nothing about money. A card doing twice the work of another can easily earn less, on a different coin or on a different day.

The term comes from professional mining, where it is quoted like a commodity price. The arithmetic applies to any proof of work coin.

How is hashprice calculated?

• Take everything the chain pays out in a day. That is the block subsidy (newly issued coins) plus the transaction fees, times the number of blocks per day.
• Divide by the total network hashrate, because the payout is split across all of it. The result is coin per unit of hashrate per day.
• Multiply by the coin price. The result is hashprice.

Notice what is missing. Your card is not in it, and neither is your electricity. Hashprice belongs to the coin and the market.

It would be the same number if you switched off. That is exactly what makes it useful for comparing.

Why does it change when you did nothing?

Three inputs move, for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

• Network hashrate. When others switch machines on, the same payout is split more ways. Your earnings fall in direct proportion. This one quietly erodes a good deal over months.
• Coin price. It is the most visible input and the one people watch. Over a year, it is often not the largest mover.
• Fees and the subsidy. Fees rise when the chain is busy. The subsidy falls on a schedule the chain published in advance. On halving coins, it falls by half in a single block.

Look at the three together. A price rise that arrives with a hashrate rise can leave you no better off. That happens often, because the higher price is what attracted the extra hashrate.

How do you compare two coins with it?

You cannot compare coins on different algorithms by hashrate. Their units mean different things, on different scales.

You can compare them by hashprice, once you convert to what your own hardware does on each.

• Take your card's hashrate on the first coin's algorithm.
• Multiply it by that coin's hashprice. That gives an expected daily figure in money.
• Do the same for the second coin, and you have a fair comparison.

The mining calculator on this site does exactly this when it ranks coins for a card. It uses each coin's live network figures, not a stored guess.

Is hashprice your profit?

No. Hashprice is revenue, not profit. Treating it as profit is the most common way people talk themselves into a bad purchase.

To get from hashprice to profit, take three costs away.

• Subtract electricity. It is the largest running cost for almost everyone. It is why two people with identical hardware reach opposite conclusions.
• Subtract the pool fee.
• Account for the hardware itself. It is a real cost spread over its working life, whether or not you count it monthly.

Treat hashprice as a snapshot, not a forecast. It describes today. Projecting it 12 months ahead assumes difficulty stops rising and the subsidy never falls. Neither is ever true.