Mining dictionary: the vocabulary of crypto mining

Fifteen generations of Bitmain chips, chips per board, power domains.

Dust in the heatsinks heats the chips and drops hashrate. Frequency depends on the room.

Also called an asic or simply a miner: hardware built for one algorithm that runs it orders of magnitude faster than a graphics card.

A chip stops responding and the chain loses hashrate. Fixed by soldering, not rebooting.

The brain: firmware, network, web interface. It does no hashing.

Joules per terahash. The lower it is, the cheaper every satoshi gets.

Board with the chips. There are three, losing one cuts a third of hashrate.

Most manufacturers give 180 days. Opening the asic usually voids it.

Feeds the hashboards. Lands on our repair bench more often than any other part.

An asic restored on the bench. The manufacturer warranty is gone.

It ties the asic to its warranty and invoice. Photograph it before the rack.

A guard that restarts a frozen miner. Frequent triggers are a diagnosis.

How many coins the block finder gets. For Bitcoin it is 3.125 BTC plus fees.

Two networks with one job: LTC and DOGE on Scrypt. The bonus costs nothing.

The field the miner runs through. It is only 32 bits, and that stopped being enough long ago.

Proof that work was actually done. Hard to find, easy to verify, impossible to fake.

Mining without a pool. The whole reward, but one asic waits decades.

PPS plus a cut of the block fees. The most common scheme on Bitcoin.

A server that adds up the hashrate of its members and splits block rewards.

Eight pools compared, FPPS versus PPLNS, connecting your ASIC and the usual errors.

Blocks found versus expected. 100 percent is the long-run norm.

Payment by your share of the last N shares. Punishes hopping between pools.

A fixed payment for every accepted share, with no link to blocks found.

A lower-difficulty solution: proof that the miner has been working.

A share sent for a job that already expired. The pool does not pay for it, tenths of a percent is normal.

The protocol the pool uses to hand out jobs and the miner uses to send shares.

Lost connection to the pool. The miner keeps hashing, but shares never arrive.

Handshake, one model in the catalog.

Kadena. These asics cannot be pointed at any other network.

Alephium, six models.

Nervos CKB, eight models in the catalog.

Zcash. An unusual unit: kSol/s and J/kSol.

Ethereum Classic. On-chip memory decides, not hashrate.

Kaspa. 19 models, a terahash here is not equal to a Bitcoin terahash.

Monero. Runs on CPUs, an ASIC barely gets ahead here.

Litecoin and Dogecoin. Measured in MH/s and J/MH, never compare with TH/s.

Bitcoin's algorithm. 136 models in the catalog, measured in TH/s and J/TH.

Dash. No new hardware since 2019, measured in GH/s.

Blake3, six models.

A 3.125 BTC reward, a block every ten minutes, the SHA-256 algorithm.

The same hardware as Bitcoin, a different economy.

A batch of transactions with a header on top. In bitcoin one comes out about every ten minutes.

A block stacked on top of your transaction. A block reward matures after 100 of them.

X11. Competition for the coin barely grows.

Brings most of the revenue of Scrypt asics today.

SHA-256, the same hardware as Bitcoin.

The reward dropped to 1.6384 ETC on July 22, 2026.

Block reward is cut in half on schedule. On bitcoin every 4 years.

Blake2B+SHA3, one model.

Both main asics lose money at any Spanish rate.

A block every second, hence the special networking demands.

Scrypt, mined in a pair with Dogecoin.

The queue of unconfirmed transactions. A spot in the block is bought with a fee.

Every transaction of the block folded into one number in the header.

RandomX, a single asic in the catalog.

Eaglesong, eight models.

Stores the chain and checks the rules. In a pool the pool runs one, so you do not need your own.

A block found fairly that never made the chain. Its reward burns.

A signed record of a transfer. The fee buys space inside a block.

An unspent transaction output. A wallet balance is the sum of those outputs.

Equihash, six models in the catalog.

Fewer operations for the same SHA-256 hash. Built into new chips at the factory.

Firmware tunes each chip's frequency separately. Fewer watts per terahash.

A catalog of factory images with MD5 checksums.

A slice of hashrate for the firmware developer. On ours it is 2.8 percent.

Lowering chip frequency. Cuts heat and noise, J/TH barely moves.

The program that installs firmware over the network, no flash drives and no soldering iron.

Chips above factory frequency. More terahashes, worse J/TH.

Reviving the control board from microSD. No password or web interface needed.

Stock and custom: what changes, what you risk, how to roll back.

Protective frequency drop on overheating. A symptom of dust and heat, not a fault.

Lowering chip voltage. Power draw falls faster than hashrate.

Fans carry the heat out. Cheapest to start with and loudest to live with.

Hot air must not return to the intake. When it does, chips climb and hashrate drops.

Mesh on the air intake. Cleaning a filter weekly beats tearing down the miner.

The only moving part in an ASIC and the first thing you'll replace.

An ASIC heats watt for watt. Dump that heat outside or warm the house with it.

Water in a closed loop takes the heat. Quieter than air, but you need a dry cooler.

The asic runs submerged in dielectric fluid. A costly entry, but no dust.

A tub of dielectric fluid, the whole miner goes in. Quiet, but service is slower.

An air cooled asic runs at about 75 dB. Ten points up the scale sounds twice as loud.

Layer between chip and heatsink. It dries out and temperatures creep up.

The breaker protects the cable, the RCD protects the person. Neither replaces the other.

A liter of fuel makes about 3 kWh. Pays off only where there is no grid.

The unit on your power bill. A 3.5 kW asic eats 84 kWh a day.

Strip of high power outlets. A managed one reboots a miner over the network.

How many watts the miner pulls from the outlet. Bitmain quotes it at the wall.

The share of wall watts that reaches the chips. The rest heats the PSU itself.

Three lines instead of one. A 32 A phase is about 7.4 kW, so two asics.

Holds the output voltage inside a band. Needed only where the mains leaves it.

The router hands out addresses on a lease. That is why a miner's IP changes, so you pin it down.

The asic's number on your network. It opens the miner's web interface.

Automatic watching plus alerts. The most valuable one: the worker went quiet.

The number after the colon, like :3333. When it's blocked, 443 saves the day.

A console into the miner over the network. Useful for logs, dangerous with the factory password.

Farm access as if on the local network. Replaces risky port forwarding.

Tariff where income equals cost. About six cents for the S21.

One time spending against monthly spending. Payback is decided by the rate, not the price tag.

Industrial site where megawatts and the power rate decide everything.

The value an asic loses while it works. Invisible in the bills, real in the payback.

Your asic sits on someone else's site for a monthly fee. Read the contract, not the price.

What one terahash earns per day. The main variable in the whole economy.

Buying someone else's power pointed at your pool. Useful for tests, not for income.

What is left after the electricity is paid. Your rate matters more than anything.

212 models, your own rate, the monthly bill and what stays in your pocket.

Buying new miners with income from running ones. Counted per kilowatt, not per box.

How long the asic takes to earn its price back. On a household rate it usually never does.

Used asics and shop rebuilds. Price follows hashprice, and the warranty is long gone.

Hashing speed: how many attempts per second a miner or the whole network makes.

How hard it is to find a block. Rises when new hashrate joins the network.

The combined power of every miner on the network. Your share is your hashrate divided by it.

The pool's estimate of your speed from the shares you send. Read the daily figure.

Shares the pool does not count. Up to half a percent is normal.

Share of time in service. 99 percent a month is already 7 hours of downtime.

Write-ups on all fifteen brands in the catalog, from Bitmain to the small ones.

SealMiner: the best efficiency in the catalog, 9.45 J/TH on the A4 Ultra Hydro.

Antminer: 58 models in the catalog, BM chips, the S, T and L series.

Avalon: 22 models, the world's first mass-produced ASIC brand.

Scrypt: eight models, from 0.19 to 0.31 J/MH.

Desktop asics on five algorithms, starting at 180 W.

The first brand with a Kaspa ASIC, 13 models on kHeavyHash.

The brand left mining, asics from 2016 to 2019.

Etchash: two models, on-chip memory matters more than hashrate.

Whatsminer: 48 models, all on SHA-256, efficiency from 12.87 J/TH.

A pass for programs. Monitoring only needs a read only key.

Holds the private key, not the coins. Its address goes into your pool settings.

Spending takes several keys at once, usually 2 of 3. One key alone does nothing.

The secret that signs a transfer. You cannot work it back out from the address.

12 or 24 words that recreate the whole wallet. Store offline.

A second code at login. It guards the pool account and the payout address, not the miner.

Several asics in one place: own power feed, airflow, PDUs and monitoring.

A mining build, usually on graphics cards. An ASIC is not really a rig.

The miner's name in the pool. It shows you which asic dropped off overnight.

The asic looks alive and earns nothing. It burns 11 euros a day for nothing.