Crypto Mining Glossary — Plain-English Definitions

A

Algorithm-locked#: What a mining ASIC actually is: locked to one hashing algorithm, not to one coin. SHA-256 silicon can search any SHA-256 chain; Scrypt silicon earns Litecoin and Dogecoin at once through merged mining; neither can ever cross over. The algorithm is the wiring itself, fixed at the chip fab — firmware steers voltage and frequency, never what the chip computes. The full anatomy: What Is an ASIC Miner?
ASIC#: An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit — a chip built to do exactly one job. In mining, that job is computing one hash function (SHA-256 for Bitcoin, Scrypt for Litecoin and Dogecoin) billions of times per second, far beyond what any CPU or GPU can do per watt. A current-generation Bitcoin ASIC delivers roughly 200 TH/s while drawing about 3,500 W (approx. manufacturer spec).

B

Block#: One page of the shared ledger: a batch of transactions bundled behind a small header and appended to the chain — roughly every 10 minutes on Bitcoin, typically holding a few thousand transactions. Each block carries the fingerprint of the block before it, so they form a chain: alter one old block and every block after it stops matching. Finding the next valid block is what mining is.
Block header#: The 80-byte summary at the top of every block: a pointer to the previous block, a fingerprint of all the transactions inside, a timestamp, the current difficulty target, and the nonce. Miners hash only this tiny header over and over — never the full block — which is why one attempt costs the same whether the block holds 10 transactions or 3,000.
Block interval#: The average time between blocks. Each chain targets a fixed interval — 600 s (10 min) for Bitcoin, 150 s for Litecoin, 60 s for Dogecoin — and individual blocks wander widely around it. Difficulty adjustments exist purely to pull the long-run average back to the target.
Block reward#: Everything a miner earns from one block: the block subsidy (newly minted coins) plus the transaction fees of every transaction it includes. On Bitcoin today that is 3.125 BTC of subsidy plus whatever fees the included transactions paid. The two parts behave differently — the subsidy is fixed by protocol, the fee part swings with mempool demand.
Block subsidy#: The brand-new coins each block is allowed to mint: currently 3.125 BTC, 6.25 LTC, and a fixed 10,000 DOGE. Bitcoin's and Litecoin's subsidies are cut in half at each halving; Dogecoin's never changes, which adds about 5.256 billion DOGE per year at a slowly falling inflation rate.
Break-even electricity#: The electricity price at which a machine's power bill exactly equals its mining revenue — above it, the machine loses money every day it runs.
break_even_$/kWh = daily_revenue_$ / (power_W × 24 / 1,000)
Example: a rig earning $10/day and drawing 3.5 kW uses 84 kWh/day, so it breaks even at about $0.12/kWh. The mining calculator computes this for your own hardware and rate.

C

Coinbase transaction#: The first transaction in every block, in which the miner pays itself the subsidy plus all collected fees — it has no inputs, because it creates coins from nothing. On Bitcoin the coins it creates cannot be spent until 100 blocks later. The term predates, and is unrelated to, the exchange of the same name.
Control board#: The one real computer in a miner: a router-class ARM board running Linux. It fetches work from the pool, drives the fans, and serves the web dashboard. It hashes nothing.

D

dB / dBA#: Decibels — the logarithmic loudness scale. Three rules cover mining: +10 dB reads roughly twice as loud; two identical machines add +3 dB, not double the number; each doubling of distance in open air subtracts about 6 dB. dBA weights the reading to human hearing. A dB figure without a distance and a source (manufacturer spec vs measured) is marketing, not data. The lived version: How Loud Is an ASIC Miner, Really?
Difficulty#: A single network-wide number that sets how many hashes it takes, on average, to find a valid block — the higher it is, the harder mining gets. It self-adjusts so blocks keep arriving at the target interval no matter how much hardware joins or leaves. Bitcoin's is usually shown divided by 10¹² (e.g. "120 T" = 120 trillion times harder than block 1). Live: BTC, LTC, DOGE.
Difficulty epoch#: The span of blocks between two difficulty retargets: 2,016 blocks on both Bitcoin (~14 days at 600 s/block) and Litecoin (~3.5 days at 150 s/block). Within an epoch, difficulty is frozen even if hashrate moves sharply. Dogecoin has no epoch at all — DigiShield adjusts every block.
DigiShield#: Dogecoin's difficulty algorithm: instead of waiting 2,016 blocks, it recalculates difficulty after every single 60-second block. That lets the chain absorb large hashrate swings — common for a chain that is merge-mined — within minutes rather than days.

F

FPPS#: Full Pay Per Share — a pool payout scheme in which the pool pays you for every valid share you submit, priced at the expected value of the subsidy plus average fees, whether or not the pool finds a block that day. Your income is steady and predictable; the pool absorbs the luck and charges a fee for it. Compare PPLNS, where income follows pool luck.
Free field#: Acoustics shorthand for sound spreading with nothing to reflect it — the open-air condition under which the −6 dB-per-doubling distance rule holds. Rooms, garages, and shared walls are not free field, and vibration carried through a structure ignores the rule entirely.

H

Halving#: The scheduled 50% cut of the block subsidy. Bitcoin halves every 210,000 blocks (~4 years) — most recently on 2024-04-20, 6.25 → 3.125 BTC, with the next at height 1,050,000 (est. ~2028) — and Litecoin every 840,000 blocks (last: 2023-08-02, 12.5 → 6.25 LTC). Dogecoin never halves: its 10,000 DOGE subsidy is fixed forever. Countdown and history: BTC halving.
Hash#: The output of a hash function: a fixed-length fingerprint (256 bits for SHA-256) that changes completely if the input changes by even one bit. Mining is hashing a block header over and over with a different nonce each time, until the result lands below the difficulty target. Each attempt is one hash — hence hashes per second as the unit of mining power.
Hash Ribbons#: An indicator built from two moving averages of network hashrate — commonly 30-day vs 60-day. When the 30-day drops below the 60-day, miners are capitulating (unplugging faster than new machines arrive); the re-cross back above has historically marked the end of miner distress. It says nothing about price on its own — it measures miner behavior.
Hashboard#: A circuit board inside a miner carrying the ASIC chips wired in chains — on the order of a hundred chips per board, three or four boards per machine. The part that pulls the drawers, and the expensive part when something dies.
Hashprice#: Miner revenue per unit of hashrate per day — quoted in USD per TH/s per day for Bitcoin, and per MH/s per day for Litecoin and Dogecoin. It folds subsidy, fees, difficulty and coin price into the one number a miner actually cares about.
hashprice = (86,400 / block_target_s) × (subsidy + avg_fees_per_block) × (unit / network_hashrate) × coin_price
Live value and history: BTC hashprice.
Hashrate#: How many hashes per second are being tried — by one machine or by the whole network. Bitcoin's network hashrate is quoted in EH/s (10¹⁸ hashes/s); Litecoin's and Dogecoin's Scrypt hashrates in TH/s (10¹²). Network hashrate cannot be measured directly — it is estimated from difficulty and observed block times, which is why daily readings are noisy. Live: BTC hashrate.
Hydro cooling#: Moving a miner's heat into circulating water instead of blasted air; immersion cooling goes further and submerges the boards in dielectric fluid. Quieter — a pump hum around 50 dB (manufacturer spec) instead of a fan scream — and bought with plumbing, radiators, and failure modes of their own. Not silent.

J

J/MH#: Joules per megahash — the same efficiency ratio as J/TH, for Scrypt machines whose hashrate is quoted in MH/s. Wall watts ÷ MH/s. Never compare a J/MH figure to a J/TH figure across algorithms: different libraries, different drawers, different arithmetic.
J/TH#: Joules per terahash — the energy a machine spends to pull one trillion drawers. Compute it yourself: wall watts ÷ hashrate in TH/s. Numerically identical to W/TH (a watt is a joule per second); older sheets write W/GH — 0.098 W/GH is 98 J/TH, same number. Lower is better. This is the survival stat: when the wage falls, J/TH decides which machines keep running. The worked example: Hashrate, Watts, and J/TH.

M

Mempool#: Every node's waiting room of valid but not-yet-confirmed transactions. Miners fill blocks from it highest fee-rate first, so a deep mempool means paying more sat/vB to confirm quickly, while an empty one lets 1 sat/vB transactions through. Each node's mempool differs slightly — it is a local view, not a global ledger.
Merged mining (AuxPoW)#: Mining two chains with the same work. Via Auxiliary Proof-of-Work, Dogecoin accepts a Litecoin Scrypt proof as valid for its own blocks, so most Litecoin pools mine both chains simultaneously — earning the 10,000 DOGE subsidy on top of LTC rewards for zero extra electricity. This is why Litecoin and Dogecoin hashrates track each other closely.
Mining#: The competition to add the next block to the chain: machines hash the block header over and over, each time with a different nonce, until someone's result lands below the difficulty target and wins the block reward. Despite the name, nothing is dug up — it is brute-force guessing, and the Bitcoin network currently makes several hundred quintillion (10²⁰) guesses every second. See Proof-of-Work for why all that effort is the point, not waste.
Mining pool#: Miners combining their hashrate and splitting the rewards in proportion to work contributed. A single machine on its own might wait years between Bitcoin blocks; in a pool it earns a small, steady stream instead — same expected value, far less variance. How the split is computed depends on the payout scheme: see PPLNS and FPPS.
Moving average#: The average of the last N days of a series, recomputed each day so it "moves" forward with the data. It smooths noise: a 7-day moving average of hashrate is far more trustworthy than any single day's estimate, because daily figures are inferred from lucky or unlucky block times. Indicators like Hash Ribbons and the Puell Multiple are built from moving averages.

N

Node#: A computer running the coin's software, holding a full copy of the ledger and independently checking every block and transaction against the rules. Thousands of nodes — Bitcoin has roughly 20,000 reachable ones — each verify everything themselves, which is why no single company can slip an invalid block past the network. Running a node needs only an ordinary computer and each one keeps its own mempool; mining is a separate, hardware-hungry job that most nodes do not do.
Nonce#: A counter in the block header that exists only to be changed — short for "number used once." Any change to the input scrambles a hash completely, so bumping the nonce gives the header a brand-new hash each try; mining is simply cycling through nonces hunting for a hash below the difficulty target. Bitcoin's nonce field is 32 bits — only about 4.3 billion values — so modern machines exhaust it in a fraction of a second and vary other header fields to keep going.

O

Orphan / stale block#: A perfectly valid block that lost a race: two miners found blocks at nearly the same height, the network built on one of them, and the other was discarded. The loser's entire block reward is unspendable. Races are more likely the shorter the block interval — a 60-second chain like Dogecoin sees them more often than 10-minute Bitcoin.

P

PPLNS#: Pay Per Last N Shares — a pool payout scheme where, each time the pool actually finds a block, the reward is split across the last N shares submitted. Your income rises and falls with the pool's luck, but PPLNS pools typically charge lower fees than FPPS because they carry no variance risk. It also rewards loyal miners and penalizes pool-hoppers, since freshly arrived shares earn nothing until they age into the window.
Proof-of-Work#: The security scheme behind Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin: to add a block, you must show a hash below the difficulty target — proof that real electricity and hardware were spent finding it. The trick is the asymmetry: producing the proof takes the whole network minutes of work, but any node can verify it with a single hash in microseconds. Rewriting history would mean redoing the work of every block since, which is what makes old transactions effectively permanent.
Puell Multiple#: The US-dollar value of the coins minted each day (daily issuance) divided by its own 365-day moving average — a gauge of whether miners' newly minted coins are worth unusually much or little compared with the past year. Readings below 0.5 have historically been an accumulation zone near cycle bottoms; readings above 4.0 have marked historically overheated tops. BasinTwo tracks it live on the Puell Multiple page.

R

Retarget#: The moment the network recalculates difficulty. Bitcoin and Litecoin retarget every 2,016 blocks by comparing how long those blocks actually took against the expected time, with any single adjustment capped at 4× up or down; Dogecoin retargets every block via DigiShield. Watch the next one live on the BTC difficulty page.

S

sat/vB#: Satoshis per virtual byte — Bitcoin's fee-rate unit, where 1 sat = 1/100,000,000 BTC and size is measured in vbytes. A typical simple transaction is about 140 vB, so at 10 sat/vB it pays roughly 1,400 sats total. Litecoin uses the same idea with its own base unit: lit/vB.
Scrypt#: The hash function used by Litecoin and Dogecoin. It is memory-hard — each hash requires a chunk of fast memory, which was originally meant to resist ASICs, though Scrypt ASICs exist anyway and dominate today. Scrypt hashrates are quoted in TH/s while Bitcoin's SHA-256 is in EH/s — a difference of units and algorithm cost per hash, not of security, so never compare the raw numbers across chains.
SegWit#: Segregated Witness — a 2017 Bitcoin upgrade that moved signature ("witness") data into its own section of each block and counts it at one-quarter weight. That discount is why transaction size is now measured in vbytes rather than raw bytes, and it stretched block capacity from 1 MB to a theoretical maximum of about 4 MB (roughly 2 MB in practice). Litecoin adopted SegWit the same year, a few months before Bitcoin.
SHA-256#: The hash function securing Bitcoin, applied twice in a row to the block header. Its output is a 256-bit number; a block is valid only when that number falls below the difficulty target. Because the output is unpredictable from the input, mining cannot be shortcut — it is pure trial and error at enormous scale.
Shutdown price#: The point where a machine's electricity costs more than its drawers earn. Two numbers set it: the machine's J/TH and its owner's power rate — nothing else. Below the line, rational operators switch off; difficulty then retargets down within about two weeks, partially restoring the wage for whoever kept running. The mechanism: How Long Does a Miner Stay Profitable?
Solo mining#: Mining without a pool: the whole block reward if you find one, nothing otherwise. Same expected income as pooled mining, radically different variance — at desk scale the per-block odds run to one in hundreds of millions, so treat any win as a documented anecdote, never a plan. The desk-scale case: What Is a Bitaxe?

T

Transaction fee#: What a sender pays to get a transaction confirmed: the difference between a transaction's inputs and outputs, collected by the winning miner through the coinbase transaction. On Bitcoin, fee rates range from 1 sat/vB in a quiet mempool to hundreds during congestion. Fees are the only miner income that survives every halving, which makes them Bitcoin's long-term security budget.

V

Vsize (virtual size)#: Bitcoin's post-SegWit measure of transaction size, in vbytes: witness (signature) data is counted at one quarter weight, so a transaction's vsize is smaller than its raw byte size. Fee rates are quoted per vbyte — a 140 vB transaction at 5 sat/vB pays 700 sats. Block capacity is likewise a weight limit equivalent to about 1 million vB per block.

W

Wall power#: The watts a machine draws at the outlet — the number your meter bills. Some sheets quote chip- or board-level power instead, which quietly leaves out PSU losses and fans. If a sheet doesn't say “on wall”, assume it's quoting the friendlier number.