OPN Intel · Network & energy
The physical layer
Every other page here reads price. This one reads the chain itself — the difficulty holding blocks to ten minutes, the energy estimated to be securing it, and what that energy earns the miners doing the work. Bitcoin is, in the end, a machine that turns electricity into settlement; this is that machine’s dashboard. All of it is as-of the weekly file — measured work, never a live feed.
Difficulty stands at 125.8 T with an estimated 917 EH/s of hashpower securing the chain — earning a subsidy-only hashprice of $38.8 / PH/day, against an electricity floor of about $56k to mine one coin. Difficulty and hashrate are as-of 2026-08-31; hashprice and the cost floor fold in the 2026-08-30 close.
What each reading means
Four readings, each with its honest limit — the same rule as the rest of the site: measured history and arithmetic, never a forecast, never dressed up as live.
The protocol's self-adjusting mining target, re-set every 2,016 blocks (~2 weeks) to hold ten-minute blocks as hashrate shifts. It has only ratcheted upward through every cycle bar a handful of retreats — the closest thing Bitcoin has to a security floor.
The catch · A protocol fact, but sampled only at each ~2-week adjustment and quoted as-of the weekly file (2026-08-31). It measures the work required per block, not price and not a forecast.
The estimated computing power securing the chain — and, by proxy, the energy committed to it. It is inferred from how fast blocks arrive against the current difficulty, so it is a statistical estimate, not a metered reading.
The catch · ESTIMATED from difficulty and block timing, never measured directly — short-window hashrate is noisy, so read the trend, not any single point. As-of the weekly file.
Mining revenue per petahash per day — what a unit of hashrate earns. It ties the network's energy to miner economics: as hashrate climbs, the same block reward is split thinner.
The catch · Subsidy only — the file carries no fee data, so real hashprice runs a little higher — and it blends a price close that itself lags (as-of 2026-08-30). Context, never a live quote or advice.
The electricity to mine one bitcoin — network power (hashrate × fleet efficiency) spread over the coins issued, at a public electricity price. Historically a soft floor: when price falls through it, the least-efficient miners power down and difficulty eases.
The catch · Our own arithmetic on two disclosed assumptions (~23 J/TH fleet, $0.05/kWh) — electricity only, so it excludes hardware and overhead, and it is NOT the non-commercial Cambridge dataset. A model and a soft floor, not a measurement or a guarantee.