Litecoin [LTC] hash rate surges over 200 TH/sec after hitting its two-month low

Litecoin [LTC] has managed to climb from a two-month low to transcend to a hash rate of 200 terahash per second. As charted on February 13, 2019, by BitInfoCharts, Litecoin currently stands at 217.86 TH/sec.

The hash rate for the silver coin has escalated due to its recent upward surge. Over the course of one year, Litecoin’s hash rate has increased significantly and reached a high of 342.89 TH/sec as was recorded on April 24, 2018. The coin’s value was booming with a value of $120.78 during the same day.

The hash power struggled for the next 8 months, gradually falling to a new low of 146.21 TH/sec. This was during the third week of December when the prices were trending below the support of $30.00. Recovering from the bottom, LTC has ramped up steadily and has marched above 200TH/sec in the latter part of January this year.

Hash rate

Hash rate is essentially the number of combination guesses made by the miner in order to compute the intensive cryptographic puzzle per second. The end goal is to find the correct answer and add the block on the blockchain to win reward.

In this guessing game, the speed of the device operating for the mining process determines the rate at which the puzzle is successfully solved.

Interdependency of Hash Rate, Mining and its Price:

Litecoin’s difficulty goes up, as more and more miners connect to the network. This requires more Hash rate to mine the blocks making mining process profitable. And hence, the Hash rate is critical for the network as it is directly proportional to the reward gained at the end of the process.

An increase in network difficulty would also mean an increase in power or electricity cost. Hence, if the valuation of the digital coin falls below the break-even, mining is no longer profitable. This is because the computational power deployed for mining becomes more expensive than the mining reward and this, in turn, reduces the Hash rate of the crypto asset.