Mining Terms in Plain English The vocabulary you'll hear around Melanin, defined
Hashrate, Stratum, coinbase, VarDiff, Yespower, dual mining — one clear paragraph per term. If you've ever opened a mining spec and felt lost, start here.
Plain English
Cross-Linked
Audit-Friendly
- Hashrate
- How many guesses your device makes per second. Measured in hashes per second, with bigger prefixes for bigger machines: kH/s (thousands), MH/s (millions), GH/s (billions), TH/s (trillions), PH/s (quadrillions), EH/s (quintillions). The whole Bitcoin network is around 650 EH/s as of April 2026.
- SHA-256d
- Bitcoin's proof-of-work hash function. Miners keep rerunning it with different inputs until they find one whose output starts with enough zeros. Purpose-built ASIC chips do this efficiently; general-purpose CPUs don't.
- Yespower
- Whive's proof-of-work hash function. Designed to resist ASIC specialization, so ordinary CPUs stay competitive. This is why Melanin can dual-mine Bitcoin on your GPU/ASIC and Whive on your CPU simultaneously without the two fighting over the same silicon.
- Block reward
- New coins paid to whoever mines a block. Bitcoin: 3.125 BTC per block as of 2024-2028 (halves every ~4 years). Whive: 200 WHIVE per block. Plus transaction fees the miner gets to collect.
- Coinbase (transaction)
- The first transaction in every block — it's where new coins are created and paid out. On Melanin, your wallet address goes directly into the coinbase transaction for the 97% miner share. The 3% platform fee is a second output in the same coinbase, fully visible on-chain.
- Stratum (V1 / V2)
- The networking protocol miners use to talk to pools. V1 is plain-text and widely supported. V2 adds encryption and modern miner controls. During alpha, approved miners receive the current protocol instructions privately.
- A near-miss — a hash that's almost valid enough to be a real block, good enough to prove you're working. Shares count toward your pool rewards and tell the pool you're still alive. Only one hash in billions is a real block; millions become shares.
- Difficulty
- How hard it is to find a valid block. The Bitcoin network adjusts it every 2016 blocks (~2 weeks) so blocks arrive roughly every 10 minutes on average, regardless of how much hashrate is on the network.
- VarDiff (Variable Difficulty)
- A pool-level difficulty that's different from the network difficulty — tuned to how fast your device can find shares. A phone gets low difficulty (so it submits shares regularly); an S19 gets very high difficulty (so the pool isn't drowning in trivial shares from it). Melanin tunes VarDiff per mining tier.
- Nonce
- A 32-bit number in the block header the miner rolls through trying to find a valid hash. 2^32 ≈ 4.3 billion values. A modern ASIC exhausts that space in microseconds, so miners also roll the extranonce.
- Extranonce
- Extra randomness placed in the coinbase transaction. When changed, it produces a new Merkle root, which effectively gives you a fresh 2^32 nonce space to search. In collaborative mining, Melanin's coordinator hands each device a disjoint extranonce range so no two devices waste time on the same search space.
- Solo mining
- You find the block, you get the whole reward. Lottery-style: high variance, no smoothing. Statistically you'd wait years on consumer hardware. Made more viable by high-hashrate ASICs or by playing for fun with a phone (expected value: near zero, but the upside is ~3.125 BTC).
- Pool mining → Collaborative Mining Network (CMN)
- The industry term pool mining describes many miners submitting shares; whoever's in the pool when a block lands splits the reward proportionally to contributed work. Lower variance, steady smaller payouts. Melanin's product is the Collaborative Mining Network (CMN) — non-custodial pool mining built on a custom CKPool fork, with rewards paid directly to your wallet via the coinbase transaction (never held by the pool). Inspired by OCEAN Pool's TIDES; independently implemented. 🟡 Phase 2 — currently in design.
- Non-custodial
- The pool never touches your money. Your wallet address is the payout target in the coinbase transaction, so mined coins land in your wallet the moment the block confirms. Contrast with custodial pools where the pool holds your balance and you have to withdraw.
- VIBE / COLLAB / ASIC
- Melanin's three hardware tiers, with difficulty and share cadence tuned to each. VIBE — phones, Raspberry Pi, low-power (educational). COLLAB — gaming PCs, BitAxe USB miners (realistic). ASIC — S19/S21, MSBX with external ASIC (high-performance). Click auto-detects your hardware and picks the right tier.
- Dual mining
- Mining Bitcoin and Whive simultaneously on the same device. SHA-256d (Bitcoin) runs on your GPU/ASIC; Yespower (Whive) runs on your CPU. They don't compete for silicon, so dual mining is roughly free extra yield on hardware you're already running.
- MSBX
- Melanin Smart Box — pre-configured mining hardware designed for solar homes. Raspberry Pi 5 controller, optional USB ASIC, 25–45 W draw, Melanin OS pre-loaded. Plug in, give it a wallet address, done.
- private mining orchestration
- Melanin uses AI-assisted mining orchestration to improve miner outcomes. During alpha, implementation details stay private while we harden the platform for public release.
- Keepalive liveness
- Instead of disconnecting miners who haven't submitted a share in N seconds (the old default), Melanin uses TCP heartbeats to check if the connection is still alive. This keeps phones and low-hashrate devices online through long dry spells without false disconnects.
Non-Custodial
97% Yours
Managed
Stratum V2
Open Source
Global
