Hash Rate

Hash rate is the physical security budget of Bitcoin — the aggregate computation racing to produce blocks, now above 1,000 EH/s (a billion terahashes per second). Log scale: it has grown ~15 orders of magnitude since 2009.

Hash rate follows price with a lag (mining investment chases profitability) but falls far more reluctantly — hardware, once bought, keeps running until it's unprofitable at the margin. Sustained hash-rate declines are rare and mark genuine miner capitulation events.