Bitcoin mining in early November: hashrate near 1,019 EH/s, difficulty up 18% since August

Bitcoin's miners are running more computing power than they were in August, and the network has made the job harder to match. Here are the public numbers as of 4 November 2026.

All figures below come from the public mempool.space API, fetched on 4 November 2026 at about 13:35 UTC (midnight on the 5th in Melbourne). Where a number is our own arithmetic on those figures, we say so.

Hashrate: about 1,019 EH/s

Hashrate is the total computing power miners are pointing at the network. mempool.space puts the current estimate at 1,018.6 exahashes per second (EH/s), which is a little over one zettahash per second.

• In the first seven days of the three-month window (5 to 11 August) the daily estimate averaged 892.8 EH/s. In the last seven days (29 October to 4 November) it averaged 1,028.4 EH/s, about 15% higher. That averaging is our arithmetic.
• A year ago the daily estimate for 5 November 2025 was 1,023.5 EH/s, so the level is close to where it was then.
• The highest daily estimate of the past year was 1,244.7 EH/s on 27 November 2025.

Daily numbers bounce because they are estimated from how fast blocks arrive. The estimate was 1,127.9 EH/s on 2 November and 910.3 EH/s on 3 November, so the seven-day average says more than any single day.

Difficulty: 148.4 T, after two rises in a row

The network adjusts its mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks, so blocks keep arriving about ten minutes apart. More hashrate pushes the next adjustment up. Less pushes it down.

• 29 October: difficulty rose 5.5% to 148.4 trillion.
• 16 October: it rose 5.9%, to 140.6 trillion.
• 3 October: it was almost unchanged (-0.03%).
• From 125.8 trillion on 23 August to 148.4 trillion on 29 October is a rise of 17.9% (our arithmetic).
• On 29 October 2025 difficulty was 156.0 trillion, so today's level is about 4.9% lower than a year ago (our arithmetic).

mempool.space's running estimate for the next adjustment, around 13 November, is a fall of 3.3%. The period was 39.8% done with 1,214 blocks to go when we fetched it. That figure is an estimate and moves with every block.

What a day of mining pays

The block reward is 3.125 BTC per block, set at the April 2024 halving. Across the latest 144 blocks (blocks 974,387 to 974,530, about a day), miners collected 452.71 BTC in total. Of that, 2.71 BTC (0.6%) was transaction fees. The rest was the newly created reward.

mempool.space's price feed showed bitcoin at US$78,249 at the time we fetched it. Putting those together is our own arithmetic:

• 452.71 BTC at US$78,249 is about US$35.4 million for the 144 blocks.
• Spread across 1,018.6 EH/s (1,018,573 PH/s), that is about US$34.8 per petahash per second per day. Miners call this hashprice. It is the revenue earned by one unit of hashrate, before electricity and other costs.

This is why difficulty matters to miners. If hashrate rises and the price does not, the same revenue is shared across more machines, and the hashprice falls. If the price rises, it can rise with it. Revenue per unit of hashrate is the figure miners watch, because their power bills do not shrink when difficulty goes up.

Where our halving test fits

Miners' pay is set by the block reward, and the reward is cut in half at each halving. The next one is at block 1,050,000. The chain tip was at block 974,530 when we fetched the data, which leaves 75,470 blocks.

We tested the popular idea that the halving cycle is a timing rule: hold 18 crypto pairs for 18 months after each halving and be flat otherwise. On the raw number it finished 35.9 percentage points a year ahead of the benchmark, across 39 trades. The unadjusted p-value was 0.188, and after correcting for the many rules we tested it was 1.000. It did not pass our luck check. Only three halvings sit inside the data, so the result rests on very few episodes. The full write-up is in the Bitcoin halving story and on the Bitcoin halving cycle test page.

That is an in-sample backtest on past data. It says nothing about the next halving or about what bitcoin's price will do.

What this does and does not tell you

These numbers describe the mining network on one day: how much computing power is running, how hard the puzzle is, and what a block pays. They are not a forecast of the price, of hashrate or of any miner's results. Every rule we have tested, including the ones that failed, is on the evidence page.

Source: mempool.space API (hashrate, difficulty adjustments, reward statistics and prices), 4 November 2026. Estimates on that site are revised as new blocks arrive.