Proof of work
Live network hashrate for the ten largest proof-of-work chains, and what a reference rig earns on each.
| Coin | Network hashrate | Price |
|---|---|---|
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| Coin | Revenue / day | Break-even power |
|---|---|---|
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Revenue is gross of electricity. Break-even is the unit price at which the rig covers its own power — compare it against your tariff, or use the full calculator for half-hourly pricing. Chains with no consumer-hardware row are ASIC-only.
Difficulty is a single number that says how hard it currently is to find a valid block. It exists because a network cannot control how much hardware points at it, but it can control how often blocks arrive: as miners join, difficulty rises to keep the interval steady; as they leave, it falls.
Bitcoin recalculates it every 2,016 blocks — roughly a fortnight — comparing how long those blocks actually took against the ten minutes each was meant to take, and adjusting to close the gap. A single adjustment is capped at four times up or down, so the network cannot lurch. Other chains do it differently, and several retarget every single block rather than every fortnight, which is why their numbers in the table above move far more smoothly than Bitcoin's do.
Your revenue is your share of the network, not a fixed rate. Roughly:
daily revenue ≈ (your hashrate ÷ network hashrate) × blocks per day × block reward × coin price
Only one of those four terms is yours. If the network's hashrate doubles and your rig does not, your revenue halves — the machine has not got worse, the competition has got bigger. That is the mechanism behind the break-even column above: it is the electricity price at which what the rig earns exactly covers what it draws, so a rise in difficulty pushes that break-even down and a rise in coin price pushes it up.
Compare that figure against what you actually pay. On a flat domestic tariff that is one number. On a half-hourly tariff such as Octopus Agile it is 48 different numbers a day, and a rig that loses money at four in the afternoon can make money at four in the morning — which is what the full calculator is for. Remember the standing charge as well: it is payable whether the rig runs or not, so it belongs in the annual view rather than in the per-kilowatt-hour comparison.
Two things this table deliberately does not do. It does not price your hardware, so nothing here tells you when a machine pays for itself. And it is gross of electricity by design — the moment a page nets off a made-up tariff, it stops being data and starts being a sales pitch.