Bitcoin mining glossary: 33 terms that show up in your pool dashboard and on your power bill
The terms below are grouped by topic and alphabetised inside each group. Every definition is written to stand on its own, so you can read one entry without the rest of the page. Numbers appear only where they come from our own dated material: the August 2026 network snapshot used in the net income comparison of pools and the scheme parameters in the PPS, FPPS, PPLNS and TIDES breakdown.
[IMAGE: daylight, a low data centre hall among green hills, grass and trees nearby, clear sky, a power line in the distance; photorealistic, bright tones]
Network and blocks
Coinbase (coinbase transaction)
The first transaction in every block, where the miner creates new coins and names the recipients. It carries the subsidy plus the transaction fees collected in that block. Some pools pay participants straight from the coinbase, so the money reaches the miner from the block itself rather than through a balance held at the pool.
Difficulty
The network parameter that sets how small a block hash has to be for the network to accept it. It is recalculated every 2016 blocks so that blocks keep arriving roughly every ten minutes. In the August 2026 snapshot difficulty stood at 127,479,855,693,691. Current values and history sit in the network difficulty section.
Halving
The scheduled halving of the block subsidy, which happens every 210,000 blocks, roughly once every four years. The subsidy is currently 3.125 BTC. After the next halving the same share of network work brings in half as many coins, which pushes down the electricity rate at which a farm still breaks even.
Orphan block
A block a miner or pool found correctly that the network did not adopt, because a competing block at the same height propagated faster. An orphan pays nothing at all, neither subsidy nor fees. Under PPS and FPPS orphans do not touch the miner's income, since the pool absorbs that risk.
Subsidy
The new coins the network issues with each block. As of August 2026 that is 3.125 BTC. Subsidy plus transaction fees make up the block reward. Over the same period fees ran at about 0.70% of the subsidy across the last 4320 blocks, so most miner income still came from issuance.
Hashrate and economics
Break-even
The point where mining revenue equals mining cost. It is usually expressed two ways: the maximum electricity rate at the current BTC price, or the minimum BTC price at a known rate. At $0.12 per kWh, a home-scale 100 TH/s in the August snapshot earned $3.01 against $3.46 of power cost, so it ran at a loss.
Hashprice
Expected revenue per unit of hashrate per day, usually quoted in dollars per TH/s. It folds BTC price, difficulty, subsidy and transaction fees into a single number, which is why it answers "what is the market paying for my machine" better than the BTC price alone. Run your own inputs in the profitability calculator.
Hashrate
The rate at which hardware computes hashes, measured in TH/s, PH/s and EH/s. It determines a miner's share of the pool's work and therefore of the reward. The hashrate shown in a pool dashboard is always an estimate: the pool infers it from the stream of accepted shares rather than measuring it.
Luck
The ratio of blocks a pool actually found to the number expected statistically over the same period. Above 100% means more blocks than expected. Over a long horizon luck converges toward 100%. Under PPS and FPPS it barely affects a miner's income, because the pool pays a fixed rate whether or not blocks arrive.
Network hashrate
The estimated total power of all Bitcoin miners combined. The August 2026 snapshot put it at 933.99 EH/s. The higher this number, the smaller any individual miner's share on the same hardware and the lower the income at an unchanged BTC price. It is not measured directly but derived from block timing.
Variance
The spread of actual payouts around the mathematical expectation, caused by the random nature of finding blocks. The smaller your hashrate and the less often your pool finds blocks, the more payouts swing between periods. PPS and FPPS move variance onto the pool, while PPLNS and SOLO leave it with the miner.
Working with a pool
Pool hopping
Switching pools frequently to chase temporarily favourable terms. Under PPLNS this destroys the value of your accumulated share window, because you leave before your contribution pays out in a found block. Schemes such as PPS+ and long-window PPLNS are designed precisely so that hopping does not pay.
Reject share
A share the pool refused: invalid, duplicate, computed on an expired job, or below the assigned difficulty. A small percentage of rejects is normal at any pool. A sharp rise usually points to overheating, an unstable overclock or a bad connection. The exact normal range differs by pool, so check its own documentation.
Share
A reduced-difficulty solution the miner submits to the pool as proof of work performed. A share is not a block, but it shows the hardware is genuinely hashing. The pool uses the share stream to estimate each participant's hashrate and split rewards. Occasionally a share turns out to be good enough to be a network block.
Stale share
A share computed on a block template that is no longer current, because the network accepted a new block while the miner was working. Pools normally do not pay for stale shares. A consistently high stale rate points to latency to the pool server, network trouble, or job updates arriving too rarely.
Stratum
The protocol a miner uses to talk to a pool: receive work, submit shares. Stratum V2 adds encryption and lets the miner build its own block template instead of accepting one from the pool. Worth checking for V2 support if you care about who decides which transactions go into a block.
Uptime
The fraction of time hardware or a pool server actually runs. Downtime on a miner is lost income for exactly that period. For a pool, the average figure matters less than the failure behaviour: how quickly it fails over to a backup server and whether shares are lost during the switch.
Worker
A separate device identity inside a pool account, usually written as "login.devicename". Workers exist so you can see per-machine statistics and spot which ASIC has stopped or is producing rejects. Payouts still accumulate on the single account balance rather than being tracked per worker.
Payout schemes
The full walkthrough of all six schemes, with the arithmetic, lives in the article on mining pool payout schemes.
FPPS (Full Pay Per Share)
A scheme where the pool pays a fixed rate per accepted share and adds an averaged share of transaction fees. Miner income barely depends on whether the pool found a block in that period. The pool carries the bad-luck risk, which is why FPPS fees usually sit above PPLNS fees.
Payout threshold
The minimum balance you have to accumulate before the pool sends funds to your wallet. At a small hashrate the threshold takes a long time to reach, and the money sits at the pool for months. In pool comparisons the threshold often matters more than the fee percentage, since it decides when you get access to your coins.
Pool fee
The percentage the pool keeps from the reward. It is taken from the same expected share of the network everywhere, not from some pool-specific yield. In the August snapshot the gap between a 1% pool and a 4% pool came to 9 cents a day on 100 TH/s, while moving from $0.05 to $0.12 per kWh cost $2.02 a day.
PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares)
A scheme where the pool pays only for blocks it actually found, splitting the reward among the authors of the last N shares. No block this week means no payment this week. Income is more volatile, the fee is lower, and the miner receives the block's full transaction fees. Poor fit for anyone who switches pools often.
PPS (Pay Per Share)
The earliest scheme: the pool pays a fixed amount per accepted share and keeps transaction fees for itself. Income is predictable, but the miner never sees the upside when mempool fees spike. Pure PPS is rare today, and pools advertising "PPS" often run FPPS in practice.
PPS+
A hybrid: the base payout follows the PPS rate and is guaranteed by the pool, while transaction fees are credited from blocks actually found, as in PPLNS. The miner gets a stable income floor without giving up mempool fee spikes. The pool fee usually lands between FPPS and PPLNS.
SOLO
Mining without sharing the reward: you take the whole block or you take nothing, with the pool supplying only the infrastructure. The income profile is a lottery. By the calculation in our scheme breakdown, 100 TH/s waits roughly 178 years on average for its block, 1 PH/s about 17.8 years, 10 PH/s about 1.8 years.
TIDES
A PPLNS variant used by Ocean: the share window is tied to network difficulty and sized in expected blocks, and payment goes directly into the coinbase transaction of the block the pool finds. The pool never holds your balance between payouts, so it cannot fail to hand it over. In exchange, income depends on the pool finding blocks.
Hardware and money
[IMAGE: sunny day, a person in a work shirt inspecting a row of ASIC miners in a bright ventilated room with large windows, greenery visible outside; photorealistic, natural light]
ASIC
A device built for one job: computing SHA-256 for Bitcoin mining. It does nothing else, which is exactly why it beats GPUs on this algorithm by orders of magnitude. Models are compared by hashrate, power draw and efficiency, and the summary table sits in the miner ranking.
Custody
The question of whether a pool holds your coins until payout. Non-custodial designs such as coinbase payouts release funds straight from the block. A custodial pool keeps a balance, which makes its reputation, threshold size and jurisdiction matter. Where to send the money afterwards is covered in the wallets section.
J/TH (energy efficiency)
Joules per terahash: how much energy a machine spends per unit of work. The lower the number, the cheaper the same hashrate. Our August calculation modelled power draw on the Antminer S21 XP Hyd at 473 TH/s, 5676 W and 12 J/TH, per Bitmain's official user guide. Air-cooled machines consume more.
KYC
The identity verification a service requires before payouts or withdrawals. Pools, exchanges and swap services treat it very differently. For a miner this is a practical question: where the mined coins can be received and converted without an account freeze. Requirements depend on jurisdiction and change often, so confirm them with the service itself.
Hosting and getting paid
All-in rate
The full price a hosting site charges per kWh in cents, covering maintenance, cooling, repairs and the site's own margin, not just the raw electricity. Comparing sites on the bare power tariff is meaningless, because the service add-ons can reverse the ranking. Ask for the rate broken down by component before you sign anything.
BTC cashback
A refund of part of a purchase paid in bitcoin rather than points or fiat. Terms vary widely by issuer: the percentage usually depends on card tier and the amount of tokens you have locked, and some spending categories earn nothing at all. Card terms are collected side by side in the crypto cards section.
Colocation (ASIC hosting)
Running your hardware at someone else's site with cheap power and industrial cooling. You still own the machines; the site sells electricity, rack space and maintenance. It suits anyone who lacks the electrical capacity at home, or the tolerance for the noise. Sites are reviewed in the hosting section.
Crypto card
A payment card tied to a crypto balance, converting the required amount to fiat at the moment you pay. For a miner it is a way to spend mined coins offline without routing every purchase through an exchange. The differences that matter are conversion fees, limits and verification requirements, not the plastic.
SLA (service level agreement)
A contractual commitment from a hosting site on uptime and incident response time, with a stated remedy when it is missed. Without an SLA, an advertised uptime figure is just a claim on a web page. Check what counts as downtime, whether planned work and grid curtailment are excluded, and how losses are compensated.
Where to go next
If you came for a decision rather than definitions: the list of pools with fees and payout thresholds is in the 2026 pool overview, and the monthly recalculation of net income on identical inputs is in the August 2026 pool comparison.
*Terms and figures checked against POOL BTC blog material: network snapshot of 2026-08-14 and payout scheme parameters of 2026-08-20. POOL BTC is not a mining pool; it is an independent comparison site for pools and related services.*