Bitcoin Forum

Data from Blockchain (formerly Blockchain.info) confirms that the current hashrate has reached 52 quintillion hashes per second. This marks the first time Bitcoin has reached the threshold in its history.
52 quintillion (52,000,000,000,000,000,000) is such a large number that it is difficult to put into perspective, as one Twitter commentator noted, retweeting the figures.
Full article on Bitcoinist (https://bitcoinist.com/52-quintillion-per-second-bitcoin-hash-rate-breaks-dizzying-new-record/)

It's mind boggling how strong Bitcoin's network currently is.

Back in september 2013 (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-mining-difficulty-soars-hashing-power-nudges-1-petahash/) Bitcoin's network surpassed 1PH/s for the first ever time, and a few days ago an all time high of 55,000PH/s was officially marked in the charts for ever. Realistically, we should be able to surpass 100,000PH/s before the end of next year, especially if the price keeps climbing up, which it likely will with the block halving coming closer and various other important events.

For comparison purposes, BCash's network peaked at 6000PH/s last month, and currently hovers around 4000PH/s. While it's significantly lower than Bitcoin's hashrate, it's still the second most powerful network in existence, however also one of the most centralized.

The article mentions Max Keisler said that price follows hashrate. Is it not supposed to be the reverse?

Mining at a loss now would be gambling, but mining because you know you can make a profit is simple economics. What is happening? Are most of the miners today gambling? I reckon most of them are losing.

Max Keiser is an idiot.

It's always price up -> hashrate up.

The only difference is that the hashrate can't always directly follow the price because a lot of the hardware needs to be bought first.

Depending on delivery dates and availability of hardware, it could mean that when this hashrate is finally being added to the network, the price has gone down again, and this is exactly happening right now. Plenty of new hardware is bought during the bull run, and now they have to suck it up in case they had big expectations.

You have to take into consideration that each minted block contains like ~$500-$2000 in transaction fees and mint has an OTC market value of around 25% over spot value.