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Where a miner's income comes from
Block reward, difficulty and network hashrate — three numbers everything else follows from.
A miner sells the network one service: it tries variants until it finds one where the block hash falls below a given threshold. For a found block the network pays a reward. Everything else follows: how much you mine depends only on what share of the total search you do and how often the network issues blocks.
86,400 is the number of seconds in a day. Divided by block time it gives the number of blocks per day; multiplied by the reward, how many coins the network hands out. Your share of the search is your share of those coins.
Check it on Bitcoin
Network hashrate is about 982 exahashes per second (9.82 × 10²⁰ H/s), a block every 600 seconds, reward 3.15 BTC. A 1.35 PH/s rig has a share of 1.35e15 ÷ 9.82e20 = 1.37e-6. Blocks per day: 86,400 ÷ 600 = 144. So 1.37e-6 × 144 × 3.15 = 0.00062 BTC a day; at $80,000 that is about $50 of revenue — before electricity.
Difficulty and hashrate are the same thing said differently
Difficulty shows how hard it is to find a valid hash; network hashrate shows how much search the market puts in. The network retunes difficulty so blocks arrive at the intended pace: miners come, difficulty rises; they leave, it falls. The formula needs only one of the two, and we take hashrate: it shows more honestly who you split the reward with.
Judging income by the rig's hashrate without the network share
Hardware sellers compare models in terahashes: "this one is three times faster". Faster, yes — but income depends not on your hashrate, on your SHARE. If the network tripled over a year, a three times faster machine brings exactly what the old one brought a year ago. That is precisely what happens: network growth eats hardware progress.
Why income always falls
In most networks the block reward shrinks on schedule (Bitcoin halves it every four years), while hashrate grows for as long as mining pays. Both push the same way: the same machine mines less over time. This is not market risk but design: if income did not fall, more and more search would pour in until it did.
A coin's mining page shows its network parameters: difficulty, reward, block time and hashrate. Take them and compute your rig's income by hand — the numbers must match our calculator.
Open miningA block every 60 seconds, reward 50 coins, network hashrate 1 PH/s. How much does a 100 TH/s rig mine?
Share: 100e12 ÷ 1e15 = 0.1. Blocks per day: 86,400 ÷ 60 = 1440. Coins: 0.1 × 1440 × 50 = 7200 a day. The coin price plays no part at all — it is only needed to turn coins into money.
Network hashrate doubled over a year, the reward did not change. What happened to the rig's income in coins?
It halved exactly: your hashrate is the same, your share is half of what it was. If the coin price doubled over the same year, income in dollars stayed put; if it did not, income halved.