Put a dollar figure on it. Bitcoin pays a fixed number of coins per block to whoever performs the work, plus whatever users add in fees. Multiply by blocks a day and the price, and the result is the annual cost of keeping the ledger expensive to attack.
$36.7m
Miner revenue, 5 May 2026
453BTC
Coins paid to miners that day
$13.4bn
Annualized at that run rate
987EH/s
Hashrate purchased with it
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
The figure moves with the price of the asset it secures, which is the uncomfortable part of the design. A fall in price cuts the security budget in the same proportion, and the budget is what deters an attack on the holdings that just fell in value. The mechanism is stable in practice and circular in principle, and both statements are true at once.
Bitcoin network hashrate
Daily average, hashes per second. What the security budget buys.
Source: mempool.space, daily averages. Computed by Institutional Asset Journal.
Why an allocator should read a mining series
Security is a purchased good here. The network is expensive to attack because it is expensive to run, and the amount being spent is public. An allocator holding the asset in custody is relying on that spending continuing, which makes the revenue line of an industry most portfolios have never looked at into a risk input for the position they do hold.
How this was measured
- Hashrate, difficulty and per-block reward and fee averages are mempool.space daily series. Dollar figures apply the Coinbase daily close on the same date and assume the protocol’s target of 144 blocks a day, so a day that produced more or fewer blocks is smoothed. Rewards are the total paid to miners, subsidy plus fees, in satoshis per block; the fee share divides one by the other. Hashrate is a statistical estimate inferred from block times and difficulty rather than a measurement, and single-day readings are noisy for that reason, which is why the charts run long. A piece dated one day uses observations through the day before.
