Most people can't comprehend the scale of hash rate growth.
Building on yesterday's letter in which we discussed the home miner who mined a solo block last week with 120-130 TH/s and a self hosted mining pool instance, I thought it would be a good time to take a step back and marvel at the rate of hash rate growth recently.
On September 15th, we wrote a newsletter acknowledging the fact that the bitcoin network had surpassed 1 zettahash. Meaning that miners around the world had reached the point where they are collectively producing more than one sextillion hashes PER SECOND in an attempt to find a hash below the difficulty target that will allow them to add a block of transactions to the ledger and get paid the block reward. This is an event that many in the bitcoin space were anticipating for the better part of a year.
Well, I was perusing mempool.space yesterday and noticed that the one week moving average of the hashrate on the network had reached 1.12ZH/s, which means that over 100 exahash has joined the network since the middle of September. That seemed pretty material to me, so I opened up the historical chart of hashrate and difficulty growth going back to the launch of the network and was a bit shocked at what I found. It took the bitcoin network almost exactly 11 years to reach the 100 EH/s milestone. According to mempool.space it did so around January 4th, 2020. From there, hashrate 10x'd between then and September 15th of this year. And since September 15th, in just six weeks, the network has added more than 100 EH/s.
I don't know if I'm falling prey to some numbers hypnosis, but this is mind boggling to me. In six weeks the network has added an amount of hashrate that took eleven years to attain when starting from zero. This is a mind boggling amount of growth in such a short period of time. And it doesn't look like the momentum is slowing down any time soon. We are currently looking at a ~6.6% upward difficulty adjustment, which should hit in the early hours of the morning tomorrow.
The factors driving this insane growth are multivariate and complex. Ranging from everything from home miners becoming more popular to bitcoin becoming more prominently integral in our energy systems to nation states plugging miners in to the mining hardware continuing to become insanely more energy efficient and performant.
It's beautiful to see. We are witnessing the exponential growth of the bedrock of the bitcoin network before our eyes, and it doesn't seem like many people are appreciating what is happening. Bitcoin is melding the physical and digital worlds together via the process of proof-of-work mining. Physical atoms are being turned into electricity that runs computers producing hashes that spit out a scarce digital good that is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, granularly divisible, extremely liquid, transparent and trivially transportable. The profound nature of this utility and the process leveraged to bring that utility to the world is understood by very few people. It is changing the world and will only continue to change our world in ways in which we cannot comprehend moving forward.
Amidst the chaos of the world, there is a great amount of tranquility to be found once you realize this. Change is here, it's accelerating and there's very little, if anything, any person, organization, company or government can do about it.
Life finds a way.
Jonathan Kirkwood highlighted a powerful dynamic emerging in the Bitcoin ecosystem that contradicts traditional business wisdom. Strike, a Bitcoin payments company, now partners with BitKey (Block's hardware wallet product) allowing users to automatically sweep their Bitcoin purchases to self-custody. Cash App, another Block product, relies on mempool.space for blockchain analytics. These aren't isolated cases of cooperation; they represent a fundamental shift in how Bitcoin companies operate.
"It's like as if everything that I do, you do, Andrew does, invites the fact that we're all going to win because of it." - Jonathan Kirkwood
This "co-opetition" model, as Jonathan described it, creates positive-sum outcomes where the work of one participant strengthens the entire network. When Strike integrates with BitKey or Cash App uses mempool.space infrastructure, both companies benefit from enhanced user experiences and reduced development costs. The collaborative approach signals that Bitcoin ecosystem participants recognize a shared mission: growing the pie rather than fighting over slices. Every integration, every partnership, every shared tool compounds the advantage of the entire Bitcoin economy.
Check out the full podcast here for more on digital capital, corporate Bitcoin treasuries, and SPAC opportunities for businesses.
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