Mining Terms in Plain English The vocabulary you'll hear around Melanin, defined
Hashrate, Stratum, coinbase, VarDiff, difficulty, solo mining — one clear paragraph per term. If you've ever opened a mining spec and felt lost, start here.
Plain English
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Readers learning mining terminology can request access now. Public pages describe what is live today.
- Configured onboarding
- Verify an email to open your dashboard. Connection details are private and are issued there once your access is approved.
- Alpha
- Glossary definitions support alpha onboarding without exposing private implementation details.
Hashing
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Getting paid
- Block reward
- New coins paid to whoever mines a block. Bitcoin: 3.125 BTC per block as of 2024-2028 (halves every ~4 years). Plus transaction fees the miner gets to collect.
- Coinbase (transaction)
- The first transaction in every block, where new coins are created and paid out. Melanin pays through it directly: 97% to the miner, 3% to the platform, written into the block itself, so a reward never passes through Melanin. Collaborative rewards split the miner’s share by work contributed.
- Non-custodial
- Melanin is non-custodial by construction: your share is written into the block’s own coinbase transaction, so Melanin never holds private keys or funds and there is no balance to withdraw. The split is 97% miner / 3% platform, settled on-chain — your wallet holds the record.
- 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 (Collab)
- Many miners combine their work and share the reward whenever any of them finds a block, which smooths out the luck. On Melanin this is the Collab payout mode, and it is running: every block the pool finds pays each rig its proportional share, written into the coinbase.
- Payout mode — Solo or Collab
- What you earn. Solo pays the whole block reward, but only when your own rig finds a block. Collab pays a proportional share of every block the pool finds.
Connecting
- 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.
- 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 ASIC miner gets very high difficulty (so the pool isn't drowning in trivial shares from it). Melanin tunes VarDiff per mining tier.
- Hardware tier — Low, High or ASIC
- What connects. Low — phones, Raspberry Pi, low-power. High — gaming PCs and compact USB miners. ASIC — ASIC-class hardware. A phone can mine Solo and an ASIC can mine Collab; neither axis implies the other.
- Keepalive liveness
- Instead of disconnecting miners who have not submitted a share in N seconds, a gateway can use TCP heartbeats to check whether a connection is still alive.
Retired names
- VIBE (retired)
- A former name for the Low hardware tier. Read it as Low.
- COLLAB as a tier name (retired)
- Collab is a payout mode only. It was briefly also a tier name, which left one word meaning two different things in the same sentence.
Non-custodial by construction is the direct-payment design. The published fee policy is 97/3 to miner and platform. Bitcoin is the public path. Confirm actual payment in your wallet; a dashboard record alone is not proof. Onboarding needs a verified email, private endpoints stay off public pages, and public code is reviewed before release.
