Bitcoin Mining Glossary

2.5D and 3D IC packaging are advanced integration schemes that combine multiple silicon dies into a single high-performance package. They…

Both 208V and 240V are nominal 'two-hot' voltages used to power ASIC miners, but they come from different electrical services,…

A high-voltage outlet providing enough power for full-size miners. Standard in homes for dryers and ranges.

A theoretical attack requiring over 50% of network hashrate to double-spend or censor transactions.

80 Plus is a voluntary certification program (administered by CLEAResult) that rates how efficiently a power supply unit converts wall…

An absolute timelock prevents a Bitcoin transaction from being included in a block until a fixed point in the future…

An absorption chiller is a refrigeration machine that produces chilled water using a heat source rather than an electrically driven…

In a hierarchical deterministic wallet, an "account" is a distinct branch of the key tree that holds a self-contained set…

An activation function is the nonlinear step applied to a neuron's weighted sum before it passes to the next layer.…

Activation recomputation, also called gradient or activation checkpointing, is a memory-saving technique that trades extra computation for reduced memory during…

The activation threshold is the proportion of blocks that must signal support for a proposed soft fork before it locks…

An adapter is a small, trainable neural module inserted between the layers of a large pretrained model to adapt it…

An adapter layer is a small, trainable module inserted inside a frozen transformer so the model can be adapted to…

An adaptor signature is a cryptographic construction that ties the publication of a valid signature to the revelation of a…

The Address Manager, known in the Bitcoin Core source as addrman, is the in-memory database every full node uses to…

Address reuse means accepting multiple payments to — or spending and then reusing — the same Bitcoin address. Although it…

BIP155 defines addrv2, a peer-to-peer message Bitcoin nodes use to share known peer addresses. It replaces the limitations of the…

Adiabatic, or evaporative, cooling uses the energy absorbed when liquid water turns to vapour to chill an air stream. Warm…

Adjusted Cost Base (ACB) is the running cost, in Canadian dollars, of a property you hold — the figure the…

Advantage estimation is the process of computing how much better a particular action was than the model's average behavior in…

An adversarial example is an input deliberately designed to make a machine learning model produce an incorrect output. As Goodfellow…

Agent memory is the set of mechanisms that let an LLM-driven agent hold onto information across turns, sessions, and tasks…

Agent-to-Agent, or A2A, is an open protocol that lets autonomous AI agents communicate and coordinate even when they were built…

An agentic workflow is an AI-driven process in which a language model does more than answer once: it plans, calls…

An AI agent is a software system built around a large language model (LLM) that can pursue a goal autonomously:…

AI alignment is the broad research effort to ensure that an AI system's behavior and objectives match human values and…

AI watermarking is the practice of embedding an imperceptible, machine-detectable signal directly into AI-generated text, images, audio, or video so…

The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) was Canada's first serious attempt at a national framework for regulating artificial intelligence.…

Air containment is the set of physical barriers that seal a hot aisle / cold aisle layout so hot exhaust…

Standard miner cooling using fans and heatsinks. Simple and effective but can be noisy for home use.

Air-gapped AI means running language models or other AI systems on computers that are physically and logically isolated from any…

Air-gapped signing is the practice of signing Bitcoin transactions on a device that has no network connection of any kind,…

An air-side economizer is the mechanism behind air-based free cooling. When outdoor air is cooler than the air leaving the…

Altcoin is short for "alternative coin" and is a general label for any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The term emerged…

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) refers to the framework of laws, regulations, and internal controls that financial institutions and crypto businesses must…

AMTC — the Antminer Maintenance Training Center — is Bitmain's official training and certification program for ASIC miner repair, formerly…

An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) translates a continuous analog voltage into a discrete digital number that a processor can act on.…

Ancestor and descendant limits are mempool-policy caps on how many unconfirmed transactions may be linked together in a chain of…

An anchor connection is a peer that a Bitcoin Core node deliberately tries to reconnect to immediately when it restarts.…

An anchor output is a small, immediately spendable output added to a Lightning Network commitment transaction so that either channel…

Ancillary services are the support functions a grid operator relies on to keep electricity flowing reliably and to balance supply…

An annular ring is the band of copper that surrounds a drilled hole or via on a printed circuit board.…

AnonCreds (Anonymous Credentials) is an opinionated verifiable-credential format built from the ground up around zero-knowledge proofs, with the explicit goal…

An anonymity set is the count of indistinguishable possibilities among which your activity is hidden. In a Bitcoin CoinJoin, if…

Antenna gain describes how effectively an antenna focuses transmitted (or received) radio energy in a particular direction rather than radiating…

AntPool is a Bitcoin mining pool launched in 2014 by Bitmain, the company behind the Antminer line of ASIC miners.…

An any-to-any model is a multimodal system designed to both understand and generate across an arbitrary set of modalities within…

Anycast is an addressing and routing technique in which a single IP address is advertised from multiple physical locations at…

AnyPrevOut, abbreviated APO and specified in BIP-118, is a proposed new signature-hash (SIGHASH) mode for Bitcoin. A normal signature commits…

The Apache License 2.0 is a permissive open-source license maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Like other permissive licenses it…

Mining in an apartment requires quiet hardware and low power. Open-source miners like Bitaxe are ideal.

Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is the class of algorithms that powers fast similarity lookups in a vector database. Exact…

APRS (Automatic Packet Reporting System) is an amateur-radio digital protocol for sharing real-time, location-aware data — GPS coordinates, weather telemetry,…

An arc flash is the dangerous release of energy that occurs when an electric arc bridges a gap between energized…

AREDN (Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network) is open-source firmware, based on OpenWrt, that converts inexpensive commercial WiFi routers and radios…

Arithmetic intensity is the ratio of arithmetic work to data movement, usually expressed as floating-point operations per byte transferred (FLOPs/byte).…

Ark is an off-chain protocol for fast, low-cost Bitcoin payments that avoids the inbound-liquidity and channel-management burdens of Lightning. It…

Ark is an experimental Bitcoin layer-2 protocol designed for low-cost off-chain payments without the channel setup that Lightning requires. First…

The ASHRAE Thermal Guidelines, published by ASHRAE Technical Committee 9.9, are the de facto reference for how warm and how…

A specialized chip designed exclusively for Bitcoin mining, far faster and more efficient than general-purpose hardware.

An individual mining chip that performs SHA-256 hashing. Modern miners contain dozens to hundreds of these.

The ASIC resale market is the secondary market in which used and refurbished Bitcoin miners are bought and sold after…

ASICBoost is a proof-of-work optimization, invented by Timo Hanke and Sergio Demian Lerner in 2016, that exploits a structural quirk…

Asset issuance is the process of creating a brand-new class of token on a Bitcoin sidechain such as Liquid. Any…

Assume Valid, set with the -assumevalid option, is a Bitcoin Core feature that lets a node skip the most expensive…

AssumeUTXO is a Bitcoin Core feature that lets a new node become usable in minutes by loading a snapshot of…

Atomic Multipath Payments (AMP) extend the idea of splitting a Lightning payment across many routes, but add a cryptographic guarantee…

The attack surface is, in NIST's words, "the set of points on the boundary of a system, a system component,…

An attention sink is the empirical observation that the first few tokens of a sequence collect a disproportionately large share…

Attenuation in radio is the reduction of signal power as a wave travels from transmitter to receiver. It accumulates from…

AutoGen is an open-source programming framework for agentic AI, originally released by Microsoft Research. Its central idea is the conversable…

Automatic Generation Control (AGC) is the centralized, closed-loop system that continuously adjusts the output of participating generators to keep system…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is the task of transcribing spoken language into written text. It is the technology behind dictation,…

An Automatic Transfer Switch (ATS) is a device that continuously monitors its primary power source and, the moment that source…

Autotuning is a custom-firmware feature that finds the best operating point for a miner's ASIC chips instead of running them…

AWQ (Activation-aware Weight Quantization) is a low-bit, weight-only quantization method for large language models, introduced by Lin et al. and…

Open-source firmware for Bitaxe miners. Web interface for pool setup, tuning, and monitoring.

b-money is a 1998 proposal by computer engineer Wei Dai for an anonymous, distributed electronic cash system. Published in a…

B.A.T.M.A.N. (Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Reseau pour mineurs) is a routing protocol for multi-hop wireless mesh networks, developed by the German…

Backpropagation is the algorithm that makes training a neural network possible. After the network makes a prediction and a loss…

A bail-in is a method of resolving a failing bank by forcing its own creditors, rather than taxpayers, to absorb…

A bank run occurs when a large number of depositors attempt to withdraw their funds at the same time, typically…

Baseload is the minimum, ever-present level of electricity demand on a grid, the "floor" of consumption that exists 24 hours…

Power plants are broadly classified by how often they run, measured as capacity factor, the share of energy actually produced…

Batch size in LLM inference is the number of requests or sequences the model processes together in a single forward…

A Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) is a containerized bank of rechargeable cells—today almost always lithium iron phosphate (LFP)—paired with…

Baud rate is the signaling speed of a serial line, measured in symbols (for simple UART links, bits) per second.…

BBS+ is a multi-message signature scheme prized in decentralized identity because it delivers three strong privacy properties at once: selective…

Beam search is a decoding algorithm that searches for a high-probability output sequence rather than sampling one token at a…

Beam width is the central parameter of beam search, a decoding strategy used to generate text from a language model.…

A bear market is a sustained period of falling asset prices accompanied by widespread pessimism and reduced confidence. A widely…

A bearer asset is one whose ownership is determined entirely by possession of the asset (or the instrument that controls…

Bech32, specified in BIP173, is the address encoding introduced for native Segregated Witness. It replaced Base58Check for witness outputs and…

Bech32m, specified in BIP350, is a small but important revision of the Bech32 address encoding. It is mandatory for Segregated…

Behind-the-meter (BTM) describes electrical load that is wired directly to a generation source on the generator's side of the utility…

A bench power supply is an adjustable, regulated DC source used on a workbench to power a board under test.…

Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is an inference-time alignment method: instead of returning the first response a model produces, you sample N…

BF16, or brain floating-point, is a 16-bit numeric format developed by the Google Brain team for training neural networks. It…

BGA, or Ball Grid Array, is the surface-mount package format used for the hashing ASICs and many support chips on…

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standardized exterior gateway protocol that lets independently operated networks, called autonomous systems (AS), tell…

The bias-variance tradeoff is the central tension that governs how well a model generalizes. Bias is error from a model…

Bill 96 formally the Act respecting French, the official and common language of Québec is a 2022 statute that significantly…

Binary quantization compresses an embedding by reducing every float32 dimension to a single bit. The rule is trivial: if a…

The BIP process is the documented procedure by which changes to Bitcoin and its surrounding conventions are proposed, discussed, and…

BIP21 defines the bitcoin: URI scheme, the format that lets a single scannable string carry not just an address but…

A BIP21 payment URI is a standardized bitcoin: link that lets a payer initiate a transaction by clicking a link…

BIP32 defines hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, the architecture behind nearly every modern Bitcoin wallet. Instead of generating and separately backing…

BIP324 defines Bitcoin's version-2 (v2) peer-to-peer transport: an encrypted message layer that replaces the original plaintext v1 protocol used between…

BIP44 is the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that standardizes how hierarchical-deterministic (HD) wallets organize the billions of keys they can derive…

BIP47 defines reusable payment codes: a way to publish a single, permanent code that anyone can pay to without the…

BIP70 was an ambitious payment protocol designed to make Bitcoin payments to merchants safer and more informative than pasting a…

BIP85 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that turns one master seed into a deterministic source of child entropy. From a…

BIP9, commonly called version bits, is a mechanism for activating Bitcoin soft forks by treating the 32-bit block header version…

Bit Gold is a proposal by computer scientist and legal scholar Nick Szabo for a decentralized digital currency built on…

An open-source solo Bitcoin miner. D-Central is a pioneer manufacturer with the original Mesh Stand.

The BitBox02 is a hardware wallet developed and manufactured by Shift Crypto, a company based in Switzerland. It stores private…

Bitcoin Core is the reference implementation of the Bitcoin protocol and a direct descendant of the original client released by…

A Bitcoin Core maintainer is a contributor trusted with commit access to the project's repository. The role is deliberately narrow:…

The Bitcoin Core release process is the documented sequence of steps that turns the project's source tree into versioned, verifiable…

The Bitcoin developer mailing list is the long-standing public forum where technical proposals, protocol changes, and Bitcoin Improvement Proposals are…

A Bitcoin faucet is a service that hands out small amounts of coins for free. On test networks, faucets are…

Bitcoin Knots is a Bitcoin full-node and wallet implementation derived from the Bitcoin Core codebase. Maintained primarily by Luke Dashjr,…

Bitcoin Pizza Day is observed each May 22 to commemorate what is widely cited as Bitcoin's first real-world commercial transaction.…

Bitcoin Script is the small, stack-based programming language that Bitcoin uses to express the conditions for spending coins. It resembles…

A Bitcoin vault is a custody construction that adds a mandatory delay and a recovery path to the spending of…

A Bitcoin vault is a self-custody design that places a mandatory delay and a recovery path between an attempt to…

The Bitcoin Whitepaper, formally titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, is the founding document of the network. The pseudonymous…

A compact encoding of the mining difficulty target stored in each block header.

bitsandbytes is an open-source library that adds low-precision quantization to PyTorch models with minimal code changes. It is best known…

BitVM is a paradigm for expressing arbitrary, Turing-complete computation that can be verified on Bitcoin without changing Bitcoin's consensus rules.…

BitVM2 is a verification scheme that enables arbitrary, effectively Turing-complete computation to be secured by Bitcoin, presented by Robin Linus…

A black start is the process of restoring a power system from a complete shutdown without relying on the external…

A blame round is the recovery mechanism a CoinJoin protocol triggers when a transaction fails to finalize because one or…

BLEU and ROUGE are two foundational automatic metrics for evaluating generated text against human reference text by counting overlapping word…

A blinded (or blind) signature is a cryptographic construction, introduced by David Chaum in 1982, in which a signer authenticates…

A bundle of Bitcoin transactions added to the blockchain. Miners compete to create each new block.

A block explorer is a web-based tool that indexes a blockchain and lets anyone search and inspect its contents: individual…

The block filter index is an optional Bitcoin Core database, enabled with -blockfilterindex=basic, that precomputes a compact filter for every…

The odds of your miner finding a block based on your share of network hashrate. Low for small miners but…

The 80-byte section of a block that miners hash. Contains version, previous hash, Merkle root, time, target, and nonce.

The position number of a block in the blockchain, starting from zero at the genesis block.

Block propagation is the process of relaying a newly mined block across Bitcoin's peer-to-peer network so that every node receives,…

A block reorganization, or reorg, happens when a node abandons one or more blocks at the tip of its chain…

The Bitcoin earned by mining a block. Currently 3.125 BTC, it halves roughly every four years.

The Block Size War was a prolonged governance conflict, roughly 2015 to 2017, over how Bitcoin should scale to handle…

The newly created Bitcoin in each block, currently 3.125 BTC. Halves every four years until supply reaches 21M.

A block subsidy reduction hedge, often called a halving hedge, is the use of mining derivatives to fix revenue ahead…

A candidate block that miners hash. Contains selected transactions and metadata ready for mining.

Block template construction is the process of assembling a candidate block for miners to work on: choosing which transactions to…

The average time between blocks, targeted at 10 minutes. Individual blocks vary randomly around this average.

A block withholding attack targets a mining pool from the inside. The attacker joins the pool and mines normally, submitting…

A block-relay-only connection is a special type of outbound link that a Bitcoin Core node opens to a peer for…

Blockstream Jade is a hardware wallet produced by Blockstream for securing Bitcoin and Liquid assets. It signs transactions on-device and…

BIP37 introduced connection Bloom filtering, the first widely deployed way for a Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) wallet to download only…

Blossom is a protocol for storing binary media, called blobs, on servers that are independent of Nostr relays. It exists…

A BLS signature is a digital signature scheme built on bilinear pairings over a pairing-friendly elliptic curve, named after its…

A Bitmain mining chip powering the Antminer S19 XP and Bitaxe Supra. Efficient at around 21.5 J/TH.

A Bitmain chip used in Antminer S21 variants and the Bitaxe Gamma open-source miner.

Bitmain's latest mining chip in the Antminer S21. Industry-leading efficiency at approximately 15 J/TH.

BOLT stands for Basis of Lightning Technology, the set of open specifications that define how Lightning Network implementations interoperate. Maintained…

BOLT12, commonly called "Offers," is a Lightning Network payment protocol that introduces a reusable, static payment code in place of…

BRC-20 is an experimental fungible-token standard built on top of Bitcoin Ordinals. Created in March 2023 by a pseudonymous developer…

The electricity rate where mining revenue equals power costs. Below this rate, mining is profitable.

The break-even electricity price is the maximum rate, expressed in dollars per kilowatt-hour, that a miner can pay for power…

Briar is an open-source, censorship-resistant messaging app that works without any central server. Messages are synchronized directly between users' devices…

A bribery attack subverts proof-of-work consensus not by owning a hashrate majority but by renting one. The attacker offers miners…

Bricking is the slang term for an ASIC miner that will no longer boot or respond after its firmware has…

Broadband-Hamnet, originally called HSMM-Mesh (High-Speed Multimedia Mesh), is a system that lets licensed amateur-radio operators run high-speed TCP/IP data networks…

BTCPay Server is a free and open-source, self-hosted Bitcoin payment processor that lets a merchant accept Bitcoin payments directly, without…

Heat output in BTU/hr, calculated as watts times 3.412. Helps compare miners to traditional heaters.

A buck converter is a DC-DC switching regulator that steps a higher voltage down to a lower one. On an…

A bull market is a sustained period of rising asset prices accompanied by broad optimism among participants. A common rule…

A Bulletproof is a short, non-interactive zero-knowledge argument of knowledge that requires no trusted setup. Introduced by Bunz, Bootle, Boneh,…

Burn-in is a reliability screening process in which a freshly manufactured chip is deliberately operated at elevated voltage and temperature…

A busbar is a rigid metallic conductor—typically copper, sometimes aluminum—used to collect and distribute large electrical currents to many branch…

A busway, sometimes called busduct, is a prefabricated modular power-distribution system in which solid copper or aluminum conductors (busbars) are…

Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) is the subword tokenization algorithm that underpins most modern large language models, including the GPT family. Originally…

Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) is the property that lets a distributed system reach correct agreement even when some of its…

Canary deployment is a progressive rollout strategy for safely shipping a new model version into production. Instead of switching every…

The Cantillon effect describes how newly created money does not raise all prices at the same time, so the order…

A capacitor stores electrical energy as charge on two conductive plates separated by an insulating dielectric. It opposes changes in…

The capacitor plague refers to an era (roughly 1999 to 2007) when large numbers of aluminum electrolytic capacitors failed prematurely…

Capacity factor is the ratio of a power source's actual energy output over a period to the output it would…

A capacity market is a mechanism used in some grid regions to ensure resource adequacy — the long-term ability of…

Capital controls are policy measures a government or central bank uses to limit the flow of money into or out…

A capital gain arises when you dispose of a cryptocurrency held as an investment for more than its adjusted cost…

Cashu is a free and open-source Chaumian ecash protocol for Bitcoin. A user pays a Lightning invoice to a "mint,"…

Catastrophic forgetting, also called catastrophic interference, is the tendency of a neural network to lose previously learned knowledge when it…

CC0 1.0 is a legal tool from Creative Commons that lets a creator dedicate a work to the public domain…

Censorship resistance is a network's ability to process valid transactions regardless of their origin, destination, or purpose, with no party…

The CERN Open Hardware Licence (CERN-OHL) is a legal tool developed by CERN to promote collaboration among hardware designers and…

CFM (cubic feet per minute) is the volume of air moved per minute by a fan, blower, or whole cooling…

Chain analysis is the discipline — and the industry — of mining Bitcoin's public, permanent ledger to link addresses, build…

A chain reorganization, or reorg, happens when a node drops blocks it had previously accepted at the tip and switches…

A chain split occurs when the Bitcoin network diverges into two competing blockchains that share a common history up to…

Chain-of-Thought decoding is a method for drawing reasoning out of a pre-trained language model by changing how it decodes rather…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique that improves a language model's reasoning by encouraging it to generate intermediate steps before…

A change address is where a Bitcoin wallet returns the surplus when the UTXOs it spends are worth more than…

Because Bitcoin spends whole Unspent Transaction Outputs (UTXOs), a wallet rarely has a coin that matches the exact payment amount.…

A channel in Meshtastic is a named, encrypted logical group that determines which nodes can read and relay a given…

Channel capacity is the total amount of Bitcoin committed to a Lightning payment channel between two nodes. It is fixed…

A channel factory is a multi-party Lightning construction in which a group of users cooperatively lock their funds into a…

A chat template is the formatting specification that turns a structured list of messages — each tagged with a role…

Chatbot Arena is an open evaluation platform launched in 2023 by LMSYS and UC Berkeley's SkyLab that ranks language models…

A Chaumian mint is a service that issues digital bearer tokens, ecash, using blind signatures, a technique David Chaum described…

Child-Pays-For-Parent, or CPFP, is a fee-bumping technique that lets the receiver of funds, not just the sender, speed up a…

Chinchilla-optimal training refers to the compute-optimal recipe established by DeepMind's 2022 study "Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models." Its central finding:…

Chip binning is the manufacturing practice of testing each ASIC die and sorting it into performance "bins" — grades defined…

Chip domain bypass is a salvage technique that electrically jumpers out a failed voltage domain so the remaining domains on…

A chip package is the protective enclosure built around a bare semiconductor die that does three jobs at once: it…

Chip select (often written CS, or SS for slave select) is a control line that tells a single chip on…

A chiplet is a discrete, unpackaged die that implements one functional block, such as compute cores, memory, or I/O, and…

Chunked prefill is a scheduling optimization used when serving large language models on a GPU. Inference has two phases with…

Chunking is the step in a retrieval pipeline where long documents are split into smaller passages before they are embedded…

A circuit breaker is an electromechanical switch that automatically opens a circuit when it detects an overcurrent, short circuit, or…

cjdns implements an encrypted IPv6 network using public-key cryptography for address allocation and a distributed hash table (DHT) for routing.…

Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) is how Canadian businesses deduct the cost of depreciable assets over time instead of all at…

Client-side validation is the design principle behind RGB and similar Bitcoin smart-contract systems, in which the full state and history…

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) is a multimodal model released by OpenAI in 2021 that learns to associate images with natural-language…

A clock domain is a region of a chip driven by a single clock. A clock domain crossing (CDC) happens…

Clock gating is a low-power design technique that disables the clock signal to a circuit block whenever that block has…

A clock tree is the network of wires and buffers that distributes a single clock signal from its source to…

The CLOUD Act (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2713, signed into law March 23, 2018)…

Cloud mining is an arrangement in which a customer pays a provider for a share of remote mining capacity rather…

Cluster mempool is a major reworking of how Bitcoin Core organises unconfirmed transactions. Instead of tracking loose ancestor and descendant…

Code review culture describes the norms that govern how changes enter Bitcoin Core. The project treats careful, independent review as…

Coin control is a wallet feature that lets you manually select which specific unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) a transaction will…

Coin Days Destroyed (CDD) is an on-chain metric that weights the movement of coins by how long they sat unspent.…

A coinbase commitment is the general technique of placing a cryptographic hash or marker inside a block's coinbase transaction so…

Coinbase maturity is the Bitcoin consensus rule that newly mined coins cannot be spent immediately. The output of a coinbase…

The special first transaction in each block that creates new Bitcoin and pays the miner.

CoinJoin is a privacy technique, first proposed by Bitcoin Core contributor Gregory Maxwell in 2013, in which several independent participants…

A CoinJoin coordinator is the service that orchestrates a collaborative transaction between many Bitcoin users, collecting each participant's registered inputs…

The coinstats index, enabled with -coinstatsindex=1, is an optional Bitcoin Core database that precomputes statistics about the unspent transaction output…

CoinSwap is an on-chain privacy protocol, first sketched by Greg Maxwell in 2013 and later developed as the Maxwell-Belcher protocol,…

A cold boot attack recovers the contents of a computer's volatile memory, RAM, shortly after power is removed, exploiting a…

A cold solder joint is a defective connection that forms when the solder fails to reach a high enough temperature…

A cold plate, also called a water block, is a sealed metal block, usually copper or aluminum, with internal channels…

Cold storage is any method of holding Bitcoin private keys on a device that is kept offline. The defining property…

Coldcard is a Bitcoin-only hardware signing device manufactured by Coinkite, a company based in Toronto, Canada. It is designed to…

Colocation in Bitcoin mining is an arrangement where you retain ownership of your ASIC hardware but ship it to a…

A combined cycle is a power-generation arrangement that captures the hot exhaust of a gas (combustion) turbine and uses it…

A Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) plant captures the waste heat from a gas turbine's exhaust to raise steam for…

Combined heat and power (CHP), also called cogeneration, is the simultaneous production of electricity and useful heat from a single…

A commitment scheme is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that works like a sealed, tamper-evident envelope: a party can commit to…

The Common-Input-Ownership Heuristic (CIOH) is the single most important assumption in Bitcoin blockchain analysis. It holds that whenever a transaction…

A compact block is a bandwidth-efficient way of relaying a newly mined block, defined in BIP152 and active in Bitcoin…

Compact Block Filters let a lightweight Bitcoin wallet decide which blocks contain transactions it cares about without telling any peer…

Compact Block Relay, specified in BIP152, reduces the bandwidth and latency of propagating a newly mined block across the Bitcoin…

Compact Blocks, specified in BIP-152 and merged into Bitcoin Core in June 2016, is a peer-to-peer relay optimization that dramatically…

Compartmentalization is the practice of dividing sensitive information, activities, and access into discrete, isolated cells, where each cell holds only…

Compute Sovereignty is the principle and practice of running your computations on hardware you own or directly control, without dependency…

Every workload running on an accelerator is limited by one of two resources at any moment: the speed of its…

Confidential Assets is the cryptographic feature that lets a Bitcoin sidechain hide which asset is moving in a transaction, not…

A config backup is a saved copy of an ASIC miner's working settings: its pool URLs and worker credentials, network…

A confirmation is a block that includes your transaction (or is mined on top of the block that does). The…

Confirmation time is the interval between broadcasting a Bitcoin transaction and a miner including it in a block, giving it…

The number of blocks mined after a transaction, indicating how secure and irreversible it is.

Confirmations depth is the count of blocks built on top of the block that contains a given transaction, including that…

Conformal coating is a thin protective film applied over a fully assembled printed circuit board to shield it from moisture,…

A congestion control tree is a proposed transaction structure, enabled by a template-commitment opcode such as OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, that lets a…

Constitutional AI (CAI) is an alignment approach published by Anthropic in 2022 that trains a model to be harmless using…

Constrained decoding, also called guided or structured decoding, is a method that guarantees a language model's output conforms to a…

A contactor is a specialized relay designed to switch high-power loads on and off repeatedly under remote control. An energized…

Context compression packs a long input into a much smaller set of learned representations, often called memory slots or soft…

The context window is the maximum amount of tokenized text a large language model can consider at one time. It…

A continuity test is a basic but essential diagnostic that checks whether an unbroken electrical path exists between two points.…

Continuous batching is a scheduling technique for serving large language models that dramatically improves how many requests a GPU can…

A Contract Execution Transaction (CET) is one of a set of pre-signed Bitcoin transactions created when two parties open a…

Contrastive learning is a representation-learning technique that teaches a model to produce useful vectors by comparison: it pulls positive pairs…

The control block is the witness element that makes a Taproot script-path spend verifiable. When a spender reveals a script…

The management board in an ASIC miner that runs firmware, coordinates hashboards, and connects to the network.

Controlled impedance is the practice of designing a PCB trace so its characteristic impedance stays within a specified tolerance of…

ControlNet is a neural network architecture, introduced by Lvmin Zhang and collaborators in 2023, that adds precise spatial control to…

A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a class of deep neural network that uses convolutional layers to filter inputs for…

A Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) is the central pump-and-heat-exchanger module at the heart of a liquid cooling system. It circulates…

A Coolant Distribution Unit (CDU) is the bridge between a facility's cooling plant and the liquid-cooled hardware it serves. It…

A cooling tower is a heat-rejection device that dumps a facility's waste heat into the atmosphere. Where a heat exchanger…

A copper pour is a large filled region of copper on a printed circuit board layer, as opposed to a…

Copper weight specifies how thick the copper foil on a PCB layer is, expressed in ounces per square foot (oz/ft2).…

Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free and requiring that all modified and extended…

Core Lightning (CLN), formerly known as c-lightning, is an implementation of a full Lightning Network node maintained by Blockstream under…

Cosine similarity measures how alike two vectors are by computing the cosine of the angle between them. The result ranges…

Counterparty risk is the chance that the party on the other side of a financial obligation cannot or will not…

A covenant is a restriction encoded into a Bitcoin output that limits how the coins can be spent in the…

A covenant is a spending condition that constrains how bitcoin may be spent in the future, rather than only who…

Cover traffic is the practice of sending dummy messages that carry no real payload, purely to obscure the timing and…

The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) publishes guidance on how it taxes cryptocurrency, and it is the starting point for any…

Creep corrosion is a failure mode in which a corrosion product, most commonly copper sulfide, forms on exposed metal and…

Crest factor is the ratio of the peak value of a waveform to its RMS (root-mean-square) value. For a perfect…

CrewAI is an open-source framework, written primarily in Python and released under the MIT license, for orchestrating role-playing, autonomous AI…

Cross-attention fusion is a way of feeding one modality (typically vision) into a language model by inserting attention layers whose…

Cross-Input Signature Aggregation (CISA) is a proposed Bitcoin protocol upgrade that would let a transaction combine the separate signatures from…

Crypto-anarchy is a strand of political thought, articulated by Timothy C. May in his 1988 Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, holding that…

A cryptographic accumulator is a primitive that compresses an arbitrarily large set of elements into a single short digest, while…

A crystal oscillator is an electronic circuit that uses a precisely cut piece of piezoelectric quartz to generate a stable,…

CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is NVIDIA's parallel-computing platform and programming model. It gives developers direct, general-purpose access to NVIDIA…

Currency debasement is the reduction of a currency's intrinsic or real value by its issuer. In the era of metallic…

Curriculum learning is a training strategy that feeds a model examples in a deliberately chosen order, typically from easy to…

A curtailable load is an electricity consumer that can rapidly reduce or shut off its power draw when asked —…

Curtailment is the deliberate reduction of electricity production or consumption. On the supply side, a wind or solar farm is…

Third-party firmware replacing stock software for better efficiency, autotuning, and monitoring features.

A cypherpunk is an activist who uses strong cryptography and free software as the primary tools for defending personal privacy…

Dandelion, specified in BIP156, is a proposed transaction-relay routing technique that makes it harder for a network observer to identify…

Data augmentation is the practice of artificially enlarging a training dataset by creating modified copies of the data you already…

A data broker is a business whose product is you. Brokers collect personal information from public records, app SDKs, loyalty…

A data lake is a centralized, highly scalable repository that stores vast volumes of raw data — structured, semi-structured, and…

Data localization is a legal requirement that data must be stored — and sometimes processed — within a specific country's…

Data parallelism is the most common way to train a neural network across multiple accelerators. Every device holds a complete…

A data pipeline is an automated workflow that moves data from where it is produced to where it is consumed,…

Data poisoning is an attack in which an adversary controls part of the data used to train a machine-learning model,…

Data residency refers to the physical or geographic location where your data is stored and processed and, by extension, which…

Data Sovereignty is the principle that data is subject to the laws and governance frameworks of the jurisdiction in which…

A Data Vending Machine is an on-demand computation marketplace defined by NIP-90. The spec sums it up as "money in,…

DATUM (Decentralized Alternative Templates for Universal Mining) is a mining protocol developed by the OCEAN pool that lets individual miners…

dbcache is the Bitcoin Core option, set with -dbcache=<n> in MiB, that controls how much memory the node devotes to…

dBm, short for decibel-milliwatts, is a logarithmic unit expressing absolute radio power referenced to one milliwatt. It is the default…

A dead man's switch is a mechanism that automatically performs a predetermined action when the operator fails to provide a…

Debasement is the deliberate reduction of the intrinsic value of a currency while its nominal face value is held constant.…

Debian is a universal, free operating system produced by the Debian Project, an association of around a thousand volunteer developers…

Decentralized Computing is the distribution of computational workloads across many independently owned and operated nodes, such that no single entity…

A Decentralized Identifier (DID) is a new class of identifier that lets a person, organization, or device prove control of…

The decode phase is the second stage of large language model (LLM) inference, following prefill. Here the model produces output…

A decoding strategy is the algorithm that converts a language model's raw per-step probability distribution into a concrete sequence of…

Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a form of network analysis that examines not just a packet's routing headers but the…

A deepfake is synthetic media — video, audio, or imagery — generated or manipulated by AI to convincingly portray a…

Defect density, usually written D0, is the average number of killer defects per unit area of a wafer, expressed in…

Defense in depth is the principle that security should never rest on a single control. Instead you stack multiple independent…

Deflation is a sustained decline in the general price level of goods and services across an economy, the opposite of…

Delta-T (written ΔT) is the temperature difference between two points in a thermal system, calculated by subtracting one temperature from…

A demand charge is a component of a commercial or industrial electricity bill based not on how much energy you…

Demand response is a grid-management practice in which large electricity consumers reduce or shift their power usage in response to…

Dendrite growth is the formation of branching, tree-like metallic deposits that bridge between conductors on a circuit board. Unlike tin…

Deniable authentication is a cryptographic property that lets a recipient be confident who sent a message during a conversation, while…

Dennard scaling is the scaling law, formulated in a 1974 paper led by IBM's Robert Dennard, stating that as transistors…

Dense and sparse retrieval are the two foundational ways to match a query against a document corpus, and understanding the…

A descriptor wallet is defined by one or more output script descriptors rather than by a bare set of keys.…

Desoldering braid, also called solder wick, is a fine woven copper braid coated in flux that is used to remove…

A deterministic nonce, specified in RFC 6979, is a way of generating the secret per-signature value k used in ECDSA…

Identifying faults in mining hardware using test equipment and systematic testing before repair.

A DID Document is the payload you get when you resolve a decentralized identifier. It is the serialization of the…

A DID Method is the ruleset that makes a particular family of decentralized identifiers actually work. Every DID carries a…

The did:web method is the most pragmatic on-ramp to decentralized identity: it ties a DID Document to a web domain…

Dielectric coolants are electrically non-conductive liquids that can touch live electronics directly while carrying heat away. Several distinct chemistry families…

A dielectric fluid is a coolant that does not conduct electricity, which is precisely what lets you submerge live electronics…

A differential pair is two PCB traces routed side by side, carrying signals of equal magnitude and opposite polarity. The…

A value that controls how hard it is to mine a Bitcoin block, adjusted every two weeks to maintain 10-minute…

The automatic recalculation of mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks to maintain 10-minute block times.

Difficulty manipulation refers to attacks that distort Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment by exploiting how the protocol uses block timestamps. Every 2,016…

The Difficulty Ribbon is an on-chain indicator that visualizes the rate of change in Bitcoin's mining difficulty. Created by analyst…

A diffusion model is a class of generative AI that produces images (and increasingly audio and video) by learning to…

Digital Sovereignty is the capacity of an individual, organization, or jurisdiction to own and control its digital infrastructure — including…

A diode is a two-terminal semiconductor component that allows current to flow easily in one direction (forward bias) while blocking…

A dipole is the most fundamental practical antenna: a straight conductor, classically a half-wavelength long, fed at its centre so…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a technique for aligning a language model with human preferences without training a separate reward…

The discrete logarithm problem (DLP) is the mathematical hardness assumption that secures every Bitcoin key. In its elliptic-curve form (ECDLP),…

Distributed Compute is the practice of splitting computational tasks — model inference, data processing, simulation, or hash computation — across…

District heating is a system that distributes thermal energy from one or more central sources to many buildings through a…

In networking, a DMZ (demilitarized zone), also called a perimeter network or screened subnet, is an isolated subnet that sits…

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, distributed naming service that translates human-readable domain names like example.com into the…

Continuously mining to accumulate Bitcoin steadily over time, regardless of price movements.

Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is the practice of investing a fixed amount of money at regular intervals weekly, monthly, or quarterly…

Domain fronting is a circumvention technique that hides the true destination of an HTTPS request by presenting one (typically permitted)…

DoRA (Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that improves on LoRA by first decomposing each pre-trained weight matrix…

The Double Ratchet Algorithm is the engine that gives modern secure messengers their per-message key freshness. After two parties establish…

Applying SHA-256 twice in sequence, the specific hashing method Bitcoin uses for block mining.

A double spend is the act of successfully spending the same coins more than once. It is the central problem…

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a 2023 method from Rafailov and colleagues at Stanford that aligns language models to human…

Drift detection is the practice of spotting when a deployed model's world has changed enough to hurt its accuracy. Models…

Drivechain is a proposed mechanism, authored by Paul Sztorc as BIP-300 and BIP-301, that would let Bitcoin support sidechains with…

Droop control is a simple, decentralized method that lets multiple power sources run in parallel and share load without communicating.…

A dry joint is a soldered connection that never properly bonded to the metal surfaces it joins, usually because too…

A dry-type transformer uses air, and often cast-resin or varnish-impregnated solid insulation, as its cooling and insulating medium instead of…

Mining Bitcoin while using the heat productively for heating spaces, water, or other applications.

A connector between a miner's exhaust and standard HVAC ducting for directing hot air where needed.

A duress wallet is a decoy cryptocurrency wallet designed to be surrendered if you are physically coerced into unlocking your…

A dust attack (or dusting attack) is a privacy assault in which an adversary sprays minuscule amounts of Bitcoin —…

The dust limit is a Bitcoin Core relay-policy threshold that rejects transaction outputs whose value is too low to be…

Dynamic DNS (DDNS) is a service that automatically updates a domain name's DNS record whenever the underlying IP address changes.…

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is the practice of adjusting a chip's supply voltage and clock frequency together to…

An e-fuse (electrically programmable fuse, or eFuse) is a tiny one-time-programmable element built directly into a silicon die. A narrow…

EAGLE (Extrapolation Algorithm for Greater Language-model Efficiency) is a speculative-decoding technique that speeds up large language model inference without changing…

Early fusion and late fusion describe where in a pipeline information from different modalities gets combined. The choice shapes how…

Ecash (electronic cash) is a class of bearer-token money in which value is represented by cryptographic tokens that can be…

Eclair is an implementation of a full Lightning Network node, written in Scala and maintained by ACINQ. It runs on…

An eclipse attack lets an adversary who controls enough IP addresses monopolize every connection to and from a victim Bitcoin…

Eclipse-attack resistance is the collection of design choices in Bitcoin Core that make it hard for an attacker to eclipse…

An economizer is a heat exchanger that recovers waste heat from a boiler's flue gases and uses it to preheat…

An edge connector is the row of flat metal contacts along the edge of a printed circuit board that plugs…

An EEPROM (Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory) is the small non-volatile memory chip found on each Antminer hashboard that stores…

Energy efficiency of a miner in Joules per Terahash. Lower is better as it means less electricity per unit of…

An electrical substation is a node in the power grid that transforms voltage between levels and routes, controls, and protects…

The cost of power for mining, measured in $/kWh. The biggest ongoing expense, varying greatly by location.

Electromigration is the gradual mass transport of metal atoms within a conductor, driven by the momentum transfer from a high…

Electrum is a long-standing Bitcoin wallet, first released by Thomas Voegtlin in 2011 and distributed under the MIT license. Rather…

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a family of public-key schemes whose security rests on the algebraic structure of elliptic curves…

Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) is a key-agreement protocol that lets two parties, each holding an elliptic-curve key pair, compute an…

An elliptic curve pairing is a bilinear map that takes two points from elliptic-curve groups and outputs an element in…

Elliptic curve point multiplication, also called scalar multiplication, is the core operation of every ECC system. Given a point P…

Eltoo, also known as LN-Symmetry, is a proposed redesign of how Lightning payment channels enforce their current balance. In today's…

Eltoo, also called LN-Symmetry, is a proposed replacement for the Lightning Network's channel-update mechanism in which any later channel state…

The embedding dimension (or vector dimensionality) is simply the number of numeric values used to represent each item in an…

An embedding is a list of numbers, a vector, that represents a piece of data such as a word, sentence,…

Emergent abilities are capabilities that are absent in smaller models but appear in larger ones, such that they cannot be…

EMI shielding is a conductive barrier that blocks electromagnetic interference from escaping a noisy circuit or reaching a sensitive one.…

eMMC (embedded MultiMediaCard) is a self-contained flash-storage package that pairs NAND flash with an on-chip controller in a single soldered-down…

An empty block is a fully valid Bitcoin block that includes only its coinbase transaction and no user transactions —…

The encoder-decoder architecture is a neural network design built from two cooperating components: an encoder that compresses an input into…

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a method of securing communication so that a message is encrypted by its original sender and…

Ephemeral anchors are a Bitcoin relay-policy refinement that creates a clean, contention-free way to fee-bump multi-party transactions such as Lightning…

Episodic and semantic memory are two categories of long-term memory that AI agent designers borrow from cognitive psychology, where Endel…

A 2,016-block period between difficulty adjustments. Each epoch lasts roughly two weeks.

In model training, an epoch is one complete pass of the entire training dataset through the learning algorithm. During a…

An equal-output CoinJoin is the most common privacy-preserving collaborative transaction structure on Bitcoin. Participants agree on a uniform output value,…

Erlay is a proposed bandwidth-efficient transaction-relay protocol for Bitcoin, specified in BIP330. Today, nodes announce every unconfirmed transaction to every…

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is the rapid transfer of static charge between two objects at different electrical potentials. To a technician…

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is the set of on-chip structures that defend an integrated circuit from sudden, high-voltage charge transfers.…

A low-cost microcontroller powering open-source miners like Bitaxe. Handles WiFi, firmware, and chip control.

A eutectic solder is an alloy mixed at the precise ratio that melts and solidifies at one single temperature, passing…

EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography is the chip-patterning technique that uses light with a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers to print…

An evil maid attack is a physical-access attack in which an adversary tampers with a device left briefly unattended, then…

EXL2 is the quantization format used by ExLlamaV2, a fast inference library for running large language models on consumer-class GPUs.…

ExLlamaV2 is an open-source inference library built for running large language models locally on consumer-class GPUs. It is the successor…

Expert parallelism is a parallelization strategy built specifically for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. An MoE layer contains many small sub-networks called…

An extended public key, almost always written as an xpub, is a BIP32 public key bundled with its chain code.…

The extranonce is additional search space that lives inside a block's coinbase transaction, used by miners once the 32-bit nonce…

F2Pool is one of the longest-running Bitcoin mining pools, co-founded in 2013 by Chun Wang and Mao Shihang. It is…

A factory reset returns an ASIC miner's software configuration to its out-of-the-box defaults. It clears the pool configuration, custom passwords,…

A fan curve is the relationship between a cooling fan's speed and a control input, almost always chip temperature, defined…

A Faraday bag is a portable, flexible version of a Faraday cage: a pouch lined with conductive material that blocks…

The FATF Travel Rule is the crypto-specific application of the Financial Action Task Force's Recommendation 16, which requires that originator…

A feather fork is a censorship strategy that lets a miner with well under half the network's hashrate pressure others…

A feature store is a centralized repository for the engineered inputs — the features — that machine-learning models consume. It…

A federated peg is the trust model that lets bitcoin move between the main chain and a sidechain without changing…

In Bitcoin, a federation is a fixed set of independent operators who collectively control funds or a secondary network through…

Fedimint is an open-source protocol for running federated Chaumian ecash mints on Bitcoin. It lets a community establish a trust-minimized,…

Fee estimation is the process by which a wallet predicts the feerate a transaction needs to confirm within a desired…

Fee rate, quoted in satoshis per virtual byte (sat/vB), is the price a sender offers for each unit of block…

Fee sniping is a mining strategy in which a miner deliberately re-mines one or more of the most recent blocks…

A feed-in tariff (FIT) is a policy mechanism that guarantees producers of renewable electricity a fixed payment for every kilowatt-hour…

A feeler connection is a short-lived, single test connection that a Bitcoin Core node opens roughly once every two minutes…

A ferrite bead is a small passive component that suppresses high-frequency electrical noise by converting it into a tiny amount…

Few-shot prompting is a technique in which you include a small number of worked examples — typically two to a…

Fiat currency is money that a government has declared to be legal tender but that is not backed by or…

A fidelity bond is a mechanism in which Bitcoin value is deliberately sacrificed or locked up to make a cryptographic…

Fine-tuning is the process of taking a model that has already been pretrained on a broad corpus and continuing to…

A FinFET (fin field-effect transistor) is a non-planar, three-dimensional transistor in which the conducting channel is raised into a thin…

A finite field, also called a Galois field, is a number system containing a finite number of elements in which…

A Finney attack is a double-spend technique against merchants who accept zero-confirmation payments, named after early Bitcoin contributor Hal Finney,…

FINTRAC — the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada — is Canada's federal anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing regulator. It…

A firewall is a device or piece of software that enforces an access-control policy between networks, deciding which packets may…

The software running on a miner that manages hashing, pool connections, and hardware monitoring.

A firmware dev fee is the compensation that makers of custom ASIC firmware collect for their work, taken not as…

Firmware flashing is the process of writing a complete firmware image onto an ASIC miner's control board, overwriting the operating…

The first-seen rule, sometimes called first-seen-safe, is the default mempool policy in Bitcoin Core: when a node receives two transactions…

Flare gas mining places Bitcoin miners directly at oil and gas wellheads, running them on electricity produced from associated gas…

Flared gas mining is the practice of siting Bitcoin miners directly on an oil-and-gas well pad and powering them with…

Flash Attention is a fast, memory-efficient algorithm for computing the attention operation at the heart of every transformer model. It…

Flip chip, also called controlled-collapse chip connection or C4, is an interconnect method in which the active face of a…

FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second and is the standard unit for expressing the raw arithmetic throughput of a…

FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) is the standard measure of a processor's raw arithmetic throughput — how many floating-point calculations…

Flowise is an open-source, low-code tool that provides a drag-and-drop interface for building applications powered by large language models. Written…

Flux is a chemical cleaning agent that makes good soldering possible. Its core job is twofold: it dissolves the metal…

A flux activator is the chemically aggressive ingredient inside a soldering flux that actually does the work of stripping oxides…

FOMO stands for "Fear Of Missing Out." In cryptocurrency it describes the anxiety participants feel when an asset is rising…

A split in the blockchain into two paths. Can be temporary from competing blocks or permanent from rule changes.

The fork-after-withholding (FAW) attack, introduced in 2017 research, fuses a block withholding attack with the deliberate forking logic of selfish…

A forward proxy is a server that sits between a group of clients and the wider internet, making outbound requests…

Forward secrecy, also called perfect forward secrecy (PFS), is a property of key-agreement protocols guaranteeing that recorded encrypted sessions cannot…

A foundation model is, in the definition coined by Stanford's Center for Research on Foundation Models in 2021, any model…

Passport is a Bitcoin-only hardware wallet made by Foundation Devices. It is designed to operate air-gapped: the device has no…

A foundry, or fab, is the factory that physically manufactures integrated circuits. In the pure-play foundry model, the foundry owns…

Foundry USA Pool is a Bitcoin mining pool operated by Foundry Digital LLC, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG).…

FP16 and INT8 are two of the lower-precision number formats used to store and compute the weights and activations inside…

FP8 is an 8-bit floating-point format used to push neural-network training and inference below the 16-bit precision of BF16. Because…

An FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) is an integrated circuit built from a grid of configurable logic blocks and programmable interconnects,…

A pool payout method paying miners a fixed rate per share including estimated transaction fees.

Fractional reserve banking is the dominant model of modern commercial banking, in which a bank keeps only a small fraction…

Free cooling is any cooling strategy that rejects heat using naturally cold ambient air or water instead of, or before,…

Frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) transmits a signal by rapidly switching the carrier frequency among many channels spread across a wide…

Frequency regulation is the ancillary service that keeps a power grid's alternating-current frequency locked to its nominal target — 60…

A Fresnel zone is one of a series of concentric, ellipsoidal regions surrounding the straight line-of-sight path between two antennas.…

FRI, short for Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proof of Proximity, is a protocol that proves a committed set of values…

A frontier model is a highly capable, general-purpose AI model that sits at the cutting edge of what is currently…

FROST, short for Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold, is a threshold signing protocol in which any t out of n participants…

FUD stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." In cryptocurrency communities it refers to negative, misleading, or exaggerated information that spreads…

A full node is a Bitcoin client that downloads every block and transaction, independently verifies them against the network's consensus…

Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP) is PyTorch's memory-efficient evolution of data parallelism. Where standard DistributedDataParallel keeps a full copy of…

Function calling, also known as tool use, is the mechanism that lets a language model interact with external code and…

A functionary is one of the specialized physical devices that operate and secure a federated Bitcoin sidechain like Liquid. Each…

A GAAFET (gate-all-around field-effect transistor) is the successor to the FinFET, in which the gate completely encircles the channel on…

Gallium Nitride (GaN) is a wide-bandgap semiconductor increasingly used in the power transistors of high-density switching supplies. With a bandgap…

The gap limit is the rule a hierarchical deterministic wallet uses to decide when to stop scanning for funds. Because…

Running miners in a home garage for noise isolation and easy access. A popular choice for residential mining.

Gated linear attention (GLA) is a refinement of linear attention that adds data-dependent gating to the model's recurrent state. Plain…

GEMM, short for General Matrix Multiply, is the core dense linear-algebra operation defined as C = αAB + βC, where…

A generative adversarial network (GAN) is a generative model, introduced by Ian Goodfellow and colleagues in 2014, built from two…

A Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a generative machine-learning architecture, introduced by Ian Goodfellow and colleagues in 2014, in which…

A generator set, or genset, is a self-contained package that pairs a fuel-burning engine with an electrical alternator to produce…

The generator point, often called the base point and written G, is a single fixed point on the secp256k1 curve…

The genesis block is the very first block of the Bitcoin blockchain, block 0, mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on January…

The genesis block headline is the line of text Satoshi Nakamoto embedded in the coinbase parameter of Bitcoin's first block…

Genset synchronization is the process of safely connecting a generator to an energized bus, or to another running generator, so…

Geothermal mining is Bitcoin mining powered by electricity derived from the Earth's internal heat. Geothermal power plants drill wells deep…

getblocktemplate, abbreviated GBT, is the Bitcoin Core RPC method that returns everything a miner needs to construct a block to…

An older, less efficient mining protocol replaced by Stratum. Required frequent polling for new work.

GGUF (GGML Universal Format) is a binary file format for storing large language models so they can be run efficiently…

GMRS (General Mobile Radio Service) is a licensed two-way radio service in the United States operating on channels around 462…

A golden nonce is the rare nonce value that, when combined with the rest of the block header and run…

Goodput is the performance metric that tells a large language model operator how much useful work their server can actually…

GPIO stands for general-purpose input/output: uncommitted digital pins on a processor or microcontroller whose direction and state are set by…

The GNU General Public License (GPL) is the most widely used strong copyleft software license, authored by the Free Software…

GPQA (Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A) is a benchmark introduced in 2023 by David Rein and colleagues to test deep reasoning in…

GPTQ (Generative Pre-trained Transformer Quantization) is a one-shot, post-training quantization method that compresses large language model weights down to 3…

A GPU kernel is a function written in a serial style that the GPU executes simultaneously across many threads. In…

GPUDirect RDMA is an NVIDIA technology that lets a network adapter or other PCIe peer device transfer data directly to…

Gradient accumulation lets you train with a large effective batch size when your hardware cannot hold one in memory. Instead…

Gradient checkpointing, also called activation checkpointing, is a technique that trades extra computation for reduced memory. During an ordinary forward…

Gradient clipping constrains how large gradients can grow during backpropagation, guarding against the exploding-gradient problem. In deep networks, gradients are…

Gradient descent is the optimization method that actually trains a neural network. Backpropagation computes the gradient of the loss with…

Grammar-constrained decoding restricts a language model's next-token choice to only those tokens that keep the partial output valid against a…

GrapheneOS is a free, open-source, privacy- and security-focused mobile operating system built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). Developed…

The Great Mining Migration refers to the mass relocation of Bitcoin mining hardware out of China in 2021, triggered by…

Greedy decoding is the simplest text-generation strategy for a language model: at every step it selects the single token with…

Gresham's law is the economic observation that "bad money drives out good." When two forms of money are required by…

Grid interconnection is the formal, regulated process by which a new power generator, or a large new consumer of power…

Grid mix is the combination of generation sources supplying electricity to a given grid at a given time: hydro, natural…

A grid-following inverter is the conventional grid-tied converter found in most solar and battery installations. It controls the AC-side current…

A grid-forming inverter is a power-electronic converter that controls the AC-side voltage waveform directly, behaving as a voltage source that…

Grokking is a training phenomenon in which a neural network first memorizes its training data — reaching near-perfect training accuracy…

A ground fault is an unintentional electrical path between an energized (hot) conductor and a grounded surface earth, a metal…

A ground plane is a large, continuous area of copper, usually a full inner layer of a multilayer board, that…

Ground truth is the set of known-correct answers a supervised machine-learning model learns from and is measured against. Each training…

Grouped-Query Attention (GQA) is an attention mechanism that interpolates between two extremes: full multi-head attention, where every query head owns…

Grouped-query attention (GQA) is a memory-saving form of self-attention introduced in a 2023 Google paper by Ainslie and colleagues. It…

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is a reinforcement-learning algorithm introduced by DeepSeek in its DeepSeekMath work and later used to…

GSM8K (Grade School Math 8K) is a benchmark released by OpenAI in 2021 to measure multi-step mathematical reasoning. It contains…

Goods and Services Tax / Harmonized Sales Tax (GST/HST) treatment is one of the more surprising corners of Canadian crypto-mining…

Guardrails are programmable rules and constraints placed around a large language model at runtime to keep its behaviour safe, on-topic,…

A hallucination is an output from a language model that sounds plausible and confident but is factually incorrect, fabricated, or…

The event that cuts Bitcoin's block reward in half every four years, enforcing digital scarcity.

A non-backward-compatible protocol change requiring all nodes to upgrade. Can permanently split the chain.

Hard money is a form of money whose supply is difficult and expensive to increase, making it resistant to debasement…

Hardened derivation is a BIP32 safety mechanism used when deriving child keys at indices 2^31 and above. In wallet paths…

A hardware backdoor is a covert access mechanism embedded in the physical components of a device or in its low-level…

A hardware wallet is a purpose-built physical device whose only job is to generate, store, and use Bitcoin private keys…

Harmonics are voltage or current components at integer multiples of the fundamental line frequency, for example 180 Hz (3rd) and…

The output of a cryptographic function. Miners search for block hashes below the difficulty target.

The cost to produce one terahash of mining power. Mining is profitable when hash price exceeds hash cost.

A hash engine (also called a hashing core) is the elementary compute block inside a Bitcoin mining ASIC that physically…

Revenue per terahash per day. A key metric showing the economic value of mining power at any given time.

The Hash Ribbon is an on-chain market indicator that reads the health of Bitcoin's mining sector through its hashrate. Created…

HASH160 is the two-step hashing operation Bitcoin uses to turn a public key (or a script) into a short, fixed-length…

The main mining board inside an ASIC containing rows of mining chips. Most miners have 3-4 hashboards.

Fixing malfunctioning hashboards by replacing failed chips and components to restore full mining performance.

Hashcenter is D-Central's term for a compute facility purpose-built around hash-dense or inference-dense workloads — Bitcoin ASIC mining, GPU-based AI…

Hashprice is the single most important unit of measure for a Bitcoin miner's revenue: it expresses how much a given…

A hashprice non-deliverable forward (NDF) is a cash-settled contract whose value tracks Bitcoin mining hashprice rather than requiring any actual…

The speed at which a mining device performs calculations. More hashrate equals more mining power.

A hashrate derivative is a financial contract whose value is tied to the economics of Bitcoin mining rather than to…

A hashrate forward contract is an over-the-counter (OTC) agreement in which a miner commits to deliver a fixed quantity of…

Hashrate futures are standardized derivative contracts whose settlement value is tied to the Bitcoin network's mining output, usually approximated through…

A hashrate marketplace is a venue, typically over-the-counter, where Bitcoin mining capacity and the revenue it produces are traded as…

Hashrate units express how many SHA-256 computations a miner or the whole network performs each second. The base unit is…

Haystack is an open-source AI orchestration framework built by deepset for creating production-ready LLM applications in Python. Its core abstraction…

High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a JEDEC-standard memory technology that stacks DRAM dies vertically and connects them to the processor over…

Header-only mining (HOM) is the Stratum V2 mode used on standard channels, where a hashing device works only on the…

Headers-First Sync is the initial-block-download strategy Bitcoin Core has used since version 0.10.0. Rather than walking the chain one full…

A heat exchanger is a device that transfers thermal energy between two fluid streams without letting them mix. It is…

A heat pump is a device that moves heat from one place to another rather than creating it by burning…

Heat rate is the standard measure of how efficiently a thermal power plant converts fuel into electricity. It expresses the…

Capturing miner heat for productive use like home heating. Makes mining economics much more favorable in cold climates.

Heat reuse (or waste-heat recovery) is the practice of capturing the thermal energy a Bitcoin miner produces and putting it…

A metal component that absorbs and dissipates heat from mining chips, critical for performance.

The Heaviest Chain Rule is a fork-choice rule that selects the branch supported by the most observed work across an…

Hierarchical Navigable Small World (HNSW) is the most widely used graph-based index for approximate nearest neighbor search, and the default…

High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a memory architecture that stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically and places them directly beside the…

HODL is a deliberately preserved misspelling of "hold" that has become one of Bitcoin's most recognizable cultural terms. It describes…

HODL Waves are a visualization of Bitcoin's circulating supply grouped by the age of its unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs). The…

Mining Bitcoin at home. Requires managing noise, heat, and power while potentially heating your space.

The hop limit is a Meshtastic LoRa configuration value that controls how far a packet travels across the mesh before…

A hot air rework station is a bench tool that blows a controlled stream of heated air through a nozzle…

Hot aisle / cold aisle is the foundational airflow layout for any air-cooled Hashcenter or data center. Rows of ASIC…

Hot tweezers are a soldering tool with two independently heated, tweezer-style tips that close on a small surface-mount component and…

A hot wallet is a Bitcoin wallet running on a device that is connected to the internet, typically an app…

A Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) is the conditional payment primitive at the heart of every Lightning Network transaction. It locks…

The Hugging Face Hub is the de facto public repository for open machine learning, hosting over two million models, more…

Human-in-the-loop, or HITL, is the deliberate placement of human oversight at critical decision points inside an otherwise autonomous AI workflow.…

HumanEval is a code-generation benchmark released by OpenAI in 2021 alongside the Codex paper. It contains 164 hand-written Python programming…

Hybrid attention describes architectures that deliberately mix two kinds of sequence-mixing layers: a small number of expensive full-attention layers and…

Hybrid search runs two complementary retrieval strategies in parallel and merges their results: a sparse keyword search (typically BM25) and…

Hydro cooling (water cooling) removes heat from an ASIC miner by running coolant — typically deionized water or a water-glycol…

Hydroelectric mining runs ASIC fleets on electricity from hydropower dams and run-of-river stations. Hydropower is a long-established, low-marginal-cost source, and…

Hyperbitcoinization is a term coined by Daniel Krawisz in a 2014 essay for the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute to describe a…

A hyperparameter is a configuration value you set before training begins, which governs how a model learns rather than what…

The I2C bus (Inter-Integrated Circuit, pronounced "I-squared-C") is a two-wire serial bus that lets one controller talk to many low-speed…

I2P, the Invisible Internet Project, is a free, open-source anonymity network built as a self-contained overlay on top of the…

The IEC 60320 C13 and C14 form the most common appliance coupler in computing and small mining hardware. The C14…

The IEC 60320 C19 and C20 are the larger, higher-current siblings of the familiar C13/C14 pair. The C20 is the…

An image embedding is a fixed-length vector of numbers that encodes the visual content of an image. A neural network,…

Image patch embedding is the operation that converts a raw image into a sequence of vectors a transformer can read.…

Submerging mining hardware in non-conductive liquid for silent, efficient cooling. Eliminates fans and dust.

A sealed container of cooling fluid for silent mining. Eliminates fans and enables overclocking.

An importance matrix, often shortened to imatrix, is a calibration artifact used by llama.cpp to improve the quality of quantized…

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a large language model to perform a new task purely from information in…

In-flight batching is a request-scheduling technique used by self-hosted LLM inference servers to keep a GPU fully occupied while generating…

Inbound liquidity is the amount of Bitcoin parked on the remote side of your Lightning channels, which determines how much…

Indirect prompt injection is an attack in which an adversary plants malicious instructions inside external content that a large language…

An inductor is a passive two-terminal component, usually a coil of wire around a magnetic core, that stores energy in…

Inference is the stage at which a trained machine-learning model is actually used: it receives an input (such as a…

An inference endpoint is the network-addressable interface through which a deployed model receives input and returns predictions. In practice it…

InfiniBand is an open-standard, high-speed, low-latency interconnect technology used to network servers, storage, and accelerators in high-performance computing and large…

Inflation is a sustained increase in the general price level across an economy, meaning that over time the same amount…

Initial Block Download (IBD) is the one-time process a brand-new Bitcoin full node performs when it first comes online: downloading…

Input registration is the opening phase of a coordinated CoinJoin round. Each participant selects which of their unspent outputs (UTXOs)…

Inrush current is the instantaneous peak current that floods into a device the moment it is energized. In a switch-mode…

An inscription is arbitrary content, such as an image, text, or JSON, stored directly on the Bitcoin blockchain inside a…

The interconnection queue is the formal waitlist of projects — both new generation and large new loads — applying for…

Interleaved image-text refers to content in which images and text alternate within a single sequence, the way an illustrated blog…

An intermetallic compound (IMC) is the thin metallurgical layer that forms at the boundary where molten solder meets a copper…

Interruptible load is demand that an end-use customer makes available to its utility or load-serving entity for curtailment, via contract…

An inverted file index (IVF) is a partitioning scheme that makes vector search scale to billions of items. At build…

An inverter is a power-electronics device that converts direct current (DC) into alternating current (AC) at a required voltage and…

IP Reporter is a small Windows utility published by Bitmain that lets you discover an Antminer's network address without scanning…

An ISM band (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical band) is a portion of radio spectrum that the International Telecommunication Union has…

Iterative DPO is the practice of running Direct Preference Optimization not once over a fixed dataset, but in repeated rounds,…

J/TH — joules per terahash — is the standard efficiency metric for Bitcoin ASIC miners. It expresses how much energy…

A jailbreak is a crafted prompt that bypasses the safety guardrails of a large language model (LLM), causing it to…

Jamba is a hybrid large language model that interleaves three building blocks: Mamba state-space layers, transformer attention layers, and mixture-of-experts…

Jan is an open-source desktop application that runs large language models locally on a user's own computer, positioned as a…

A Just-In-Time (JIT) channel is one that a Lightning Service Provider opens in direct response to an incoming payment destined…

The Job Declaration Protocol (JDP) is the Stratum V2 sub-protocol that hands block-template construction back to the miner. Under legacy…

The Job Declaration Protocol is the part of Stratum V2 that returns transaction-selection power to the people running the hardware.…

The Job Declarator is the moving part of Stratum V2 that actually carries a miner's transaction choices to the pool…

JoinMarket is open-source software for building CoinJoin transactions, with an incentive structure designed to make collaborative privacy practical. It creates…

JSON mode is a generation setting that forces a language model to return output that parses as valid JSON. It…

JTAG is a hardware debug standard defined by IEEE 1149.1 that exposes a small serial interface (TCK, TMS, TDI, TDO,…

K-quants are a family of quantization formats in llama.cpp, the GGUF-based ecosystem, denoted by names such as Q4_K_M, Q5_K_S, and…

Kali Linux is a free, open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution built for penetration testing, security auditing, and digital forensics. It is…

The kernel log is the most detailed diagnostic source on an ASIC miner, recording what the firmware sees as it…

A key ceremony is a structured, deliberate procedure for generating cryptographic keys, and distributing any resulting shares, under controlled conditions…

Every Taproot output can be unlocked two different ways, and the chooser picks at spending time. The key path is…

Keyoxide is free, open-source software for building and verifying decentralized online identities. A Keyoxide profile is a collection of identity…

Keysend is a Lightning Network feature that lets one node push a payment directly to another node's public key without…

The KL penalty is a regularization term used throughout reinforcement-learning fine-tuning of language models. It measures the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence,…

Knowledge distillation is a model-compression technique that transfers the behaviour of a large, capable teacher model into a smaller, cheaper…

A knowledge graph is a structured representation of information in which real-world entities (people, devices, miners, firmware versions) are stored…

KoboldCpp is an open-source, easy-to-use AI text-generation tool that builds on top of llama.cpp. It is distributed as a single…

Krux is open-source firmware, developed under the selfcustody project, that turns inexpensive off-the-shelf Kendryte K210 boards, such as the Maix…

KTO (Kahneman-Tversky Optimization) is a method for aligning large language models that learns from a single binary label per response…

The KV cache, short for key-value cache, is the working memory that makes autoregressive text generation practical. During inference, a…

KV cache quantization reduces the memory footprint of long-context inference by storing cached attention keys and values in low-precision integer…

kVA, or kilovolt-amperes, measures the apparent power an alternating-current load pulls from the supply. It is the vector sum of…

kVAR, kilovolt-amperes reactive, quantifies reactive power the portion of alternating-current power that flows back and forth between source and load…

Know Your Customer (KYC) is the identity-verification process that regulated financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges are required to perform before…

The KZG polynomial commitment, named after Kate, Zaverucha, and Goldberg, is a pairing-based scheme that commits to a polynomial with…

Landfill gas mining powers ASIC miners with electricity made from methane captured at municipal landfills or biogas facilities. As buried…

LangChain is an open-source framework for building applications on top of large language models, including agents that can call tools…

LangGraph is an open-source orchestration framework and runtime, developed by the LangChain team, for building stateful and long-running AI agents.…

"Laser eyes" refers to a Bitcoin social-media meme in which people edit glowing red beams onto the eyes of their…

Latch-up is a destructive failure mode unique to CMOS in which an unintended low-impedance path forms directly between the power…

Late interaction is a retrieval architecture, popularized by the ColBERT model (Khattab and Zaharia, 2020), that sits between cheap single-vector…

A latent space is the abstract, lower-dimensional space in which a machine-learning model represents the compressed, essential features of its…

Law 25 is the common name for Quebec's Act to modernize legislative provisions as regards the protection of personal information,…

Layer normalization, introduced by Ba, Kiros, and Hinton in 2016, is a technique that stabilizes neural network training by re-scaling…

Lazy consensus is the informal decision-making model used by the Bitcoin Core project. There is no formal voting, no board,…

Leakage current is the current that flows through a transistor when it is nominally 'off' and not actively switching. It…

Ledger is a manufacturer of hardware wallets, including the Nano and Stax model lines, that store private keys offline and…

The lender of last resort is the function, usually performed by a central bank, of providing emergency liquidity to financial…

A lifted pad is a copper landing pad that has separated from the laminate surface of the circuit board it…

A Lightning Address is an email-like identifier in the form username@domain.com that anyone can pay over the Lightning Network without…

The Lightning Dev Kit (LDK) is a complete Lightning Network implementation delivered as a software development kit rather than a…

A Lightning invoice in the BOLT11 format is a single bech32-encoded string that encodes everything a sender needs to make…

A Layer 2 protocol enabling fast, cheap Bitcoin payments through off-chain payment channels.

A Lightning Service Provider (LSP) is a business or node operator that helps users connect to and transact on the…

Lightning Terminal (litd, also written LiT) is a browser-based application from Lightning Labs for managing Lightning Network channel liquidity. It…

The Lindy Effect (also called Lindy's Law) holds that for non-perishable things — ideas, technologies, books, or cultural artifacts —…

Line of sight (LOS) is the direct, unobstructed path between a transmitting and receiving antenna. At the VHF, UHF, and…

Linear attention is a family of attention mechanisms that reduce the cost of self-attention from quadratic to linear in the…

A link budget is the full accounting of every gain and loss along a radio path, used to predict the…

A Linux distribution (or distro) is a complete operating system assembled from the Linux kernel together with the additional software…

The Liquid Network is a Bitcoin sidechain launched by Blockstream in 2018 and governed by an open federation of exchanges,…

Liquidity is the ease with which an asset can be bought or sold without significantly moving its price. A highly…

Liquidity ads are a way for Lightning nodes to advertise, directly over the network's gossip layer, that they are willing…

llama.cpp is an open-source inference engine, written primarily in C and C++, that runs large language models (LLMs) entirely on…

The LLC resonant converter is the isolated DC-DC stage found in most modern high-efficiency ASIC and server power supplies. It…

LM Studio is a free desktop application for discovering, downloading, and running open-weight large language models entirely on your own…

LND (Lightning Network Daemon) is one of the most widely deployed implementations of a full Lightning Network node. Written in…

LNURL is a family of open standards (the LUD series) that wrap interactions with a Lightning service inside a bech32-encoded…

LNURL-auth is the LNURL subprotocol (LUD-04) that turns a Lightning wallet into a password-free login credential. Instead of a username…

A load balancer is a network component that distributes incoming requests across a pool of backend servers so that no…

Load factor is the ratio of average electrical demand to peak demand over a billing period, expressed as a number…

Load following is the practice of increasing and decreasing generation over a period of many minutes to hours to track…

Local LLM is a large language model deployed on hardware under your direct control — a personal computer, a server…

Locktime (the nLockTime field) is a 4-byte value at the end of every Bitcoin transaction that specifies the earliest point…

A logic analyzer is a test instrument that samples many digital lines simultaneously and displays them as parallel timing waveforms.…

Logit bias is a per-token override applied during decoding that nudges or forbids specific tokens regardless of what the model…

A long context window refers to a language model whose maximum input length stretches well beyond the few-thousand-token windows of…

Nodes accept the chain with the most proof of work as the valid blockchain. Resolves competing chains.

Lookahead decoding is a parallel decoding algorithm that accelerates language-model inference by breaking the strict left-to-right dependency of autoregressive generation.…

LoRa (Long Range) is a radio modulation technique developed by Semtech that enables long-distance wireless data transmission at very low…

LoRA, short for Low-Rank Adaptation, is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique introduced by Hu et al. in 2021. Instead of updating…

LoRA alpha (often written lora_alpha) is the scaling hyperparameter that controls how strongly a LoRA adapter's low-rank update is applied…

LoRA rank, written as r, is the central hyperparameter of Low-Rank Adaptation. It sets the inner dimension of the two…

LoRaWAN is an open, royalty-free networking protocol standardised by the LoRa Alliance that sits on top of Semtech's LoRa radio…

Loss scaling is a numerical technique that keeps low-precision training stable by preventing small gradients from vanishing to zero. In…

Lost in the middle is a documented failure pattern in which a language model retrieves and reasons over information most…

Solo mining with low odds but full block reward potential. The thrill of the possibility, every hash counts.

A low-dropout regulator (LDO) is a type of linear voltage regulator that can hold its output steady even when the…

Luxor Mining Pool is a Bitcoin mining pool operated by Luxor Technology, a U.S.-based company that also runs hashrate derivatives…

A MAC (Media Access Control) address is a 48-bit identifier assigned to a network interface controller (NIC) and used to…

A man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack is one in which an attacker secretly relays — and possibly alters — communications between two…

Market capitalization, or "market cap," is the total market value of a cryptocurrency at a given moment. It is calculated…

A mask set is the complete group of photomasks required to manufacture a particular chip. Each photomask, also called a…

Masked language modeling (MLM) is a self-supervised pretraining task, popularized by BERT, in which some tokens of an input sentence…

A Merkelized Alternative Script Tree, or MAST, is a way to lock bitcoin to many possible spending conditions while only…

Master weights are a full-precision FP32 copy of a model's parameters maintained throughout low-precision training. In mixed-precision training, weights, activations,…

A Matryoshka embedding is a vector representation trained so that its leading dimensions already carry the most important information. Named…

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic in late 2024, for connecting AI applications to…

Median Time Past, or MTP, is the timestamp Bitcoin uses to evaluate time-based timelocks. Instead of trusting a single block's…

A medium of exchange is one of the three classical functions of money, alongside unit of account and store of…

Medusa is an inference-acceleration framework that speeds up language-model generation by adding multiple lightweight prediction heads on top of the…

Meek is a pluggable transport that disguises censored but lawful traffic as ordinary HTTPS requests to a major, hard-to-block web…

A megawatt (MW) is a unit of power equal to one million watts, or 1,000 kilowatts. It expresses the rate…

A membership inference attack answers a single, privacy-sensitive question: was this exact data point part of the model's training set?…

Memory bandwidth is the rate at which a processor can transfer data between its compute cores and its memory, measured…

The memory wall is the long-running phenomenon in which processor speed has improved far faster than memory bandwidth and latency,…

The waiting area for unconfirmed transactions. Miners pick transactions from here to include in blocks.

Mempool eviction is what a Bitcoin node does when its memory pool fills up: to stay within its configured size…

The mempool minimum fee is the feerate floor a transaction must meet to be accepted into a particular node's memory…

Mempool persistence is the feature that lets a Bitcoin Core node remember its pool of unconfirmed transactions across a restart.…

Mempool policy is the body of local, node-configurable rules that govern which unconfirmed transactions a Bitcoin Core node will accept…

mempool.space is an open-source block explorer and mempool visualizer maintained by The Mempool Open Source Project. It displays real-time and…

Merged mining lets a miner work on two or more separate blockchains simultaneously using a single proof-of-work computation. The technique,…

A merkle proof, also called an inclusion proof or merkle branch, is the compact set of hashes that lets anyone…

A hash summarizing all transactions in a block using a tree structure for efficient verification.

Merkleize All The Things, abbreviated MATT, is an experimental research approach for general smart contracts on Bitcoin, developed by Salvatore…

Mesh routing is the set of techniques by which a network of peer radios relays each other's messages, so data…

A mesh VPN is an overlay network in which devices form encrypted, peer-to-peer tunnels directly with one another instead of…

Meshtastic is an open-source project and firmware stack for LoRa radio hardware that turns commodity microcontroller boards into a peer-to-peer…

Meta-prompting is an advanced technique in which a language model is used to generate, refine, or analyse prompts — rather…

Metadata is data about data: the contextual details surrounding an activity rather than its content. For a phone call, the…

Metadata-resistant messaging refers to communication systems engineered to conceal not just the contents of messages but the metadata surrounding them,…

Metcalfe's Law is a heuristic from network theory proposing that the value of a communications network grows in proportion to…

Methane mitigation refers to any approach that reduces the release of methane (CH₄) into the atmosphere. Methane is a short-lived…

MiCA, the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2023/1114), is the European Union's comprehensive framework establishing uniform rules for crypto-assets…

A microcontroller (MCU) is a single chip that packs a CPU core, a small amount of RAM and flash memory,…

A microgrid is a local electrical network with clearly defined boundaries that behaves as a single, controllable entity. It bundles…

Miner capitulation is the point in a market cycle where a meaningful share of the Bitcoin mining sector becomes unprofitable…

The miner web UI is the browser-based control panel that an ASIC miner serves from its own control board. You…

A Miner-Activated Soft Fork (MASF) is a backward-compatible protocol upgrade that switches on after a supermajority of miners signal their…

Using specialized hardware to validate Bitcoin transactions and earn block rewards by solving cryptographic puzzles.

In Canada, the tax treatment of Bitcoin mining hinges on whether the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) views the activity as…

A mining job is the packet of work a pool sends to a connected miner over the Stratum protocol. Delivered…

A group of miners who combine computing power and share block rewards proportionally.

Mining pool decentralization refers to the goal of distributing control over Bitcoin block construction across many independent miners rather than…

A mining pool fee is the cut a pool keeps from the rewards it distributes, charged in exchange for aggregating…

Net financial return from mining after subtracting electricity and other costs from Bitcoin earned.

Mining variance is the statistical randomness baked into proof-of-work. Because each hash is an independent lottery ticket with the same…

Mining-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a managed model in which a provider handles the operational side of Bitcoin mining — procurement, deployment,…

Miniscript is a language for expressing a well-defined subset of Bitcoin Script in a structured way, designed so that scripts…

signify and minisign are deliberately minimal tools for signing files and verifying those signatures. signify was written for OpenBSD to…

The MIT License is one of the shortest and most widely adopted permissive licenses. It permits anyone to use, copy,…

A mixnet, or mix network, is a class of anonymity network designed to defeat traffic analysis, the practice of deducing…

Mixture of Depths (MoD) is a transformer technique, introduced by Google DeepMind, that spends compute unevenly across tokens. In a…

Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a neural network architecture that splits a model's feed-forward layers into many specialized sub-networks called…

Mixture of Tokens is a Transformer architecture, presented at NeurIPS 2024, designed as a more stable alternative to the sparse…

MLC-LLM (Machine Learning Compilation for LLMs) is an open-source universal deployment engine for large language models. Its goal is to…

MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) is the set of practices, tooling, and culture that takes a trained machine learning model out…

MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) is a benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks and colleagues in 2020 to measure how much…

A modality projector, also called a connector, is the bridge component in a multimodal large language model (MLLM) that translates…

Mode collapse describes a failure in which a model converges on a narrow band of outputs, producing similar, stereotyped responses…

A model backdoor, also called a neural trojan, is a hidden malicious behavior planted in a machine learning model during…

A model card is a short, structured document that records the essential facts about a machine-learning model: what it is…

A model checkpoint is a saved snapshot of a model's state captured at a point during training. A complete checkpoint…

Model collapse is the progressive degradation that occurs when a generative model is trained, generation after generation, on data produced…

Model distillation, also called knowledge distillation, is a compression technique in which a small student model is trained to imitate…

A model extraction attack, also called model stealing, recreates or closely approximates a proprietary machine learning model by repeatedly querying…

Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) measures how efficiently an AI workload uses its hardware. It is the ratio of the useful…

A model inversion attack attempts to reconstruct or infer the private features of the data a machine learning model was…

Model monitoring is the continuous process of observing a deployed model's behavior and performance in production. A model that scored…

A model registry is a centralized repository that stores trained machine learning models along with their metadata and manages each…

Model serving is the infrastructure layer that takes a trained machine learning model and makes it answer prediction requests in…

Modular arithmetic is a system in which numbers wrap around upon reaching a fixed value called the modulus, exactly the…

Moore's Law is the observation, first made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, that the number of transistors that…

A MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) is a voltage-controlled switch and the most common power-handling device on a mining ASIC's hashboard…

An MPC wallet uses multi-party computation (MPC) to replace a single private key with distributed cryptographic control. Authority is divided…

MT-Bench is a benchmark introduced by Lianmin Zheng and colleagues in 2023 to evaluate a language model's conversational ability over…

Mt. Gox was a Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange that, at its peak around 2013, handled the large majority of global Bitcoin…

A multi-agent system coordinates two or more LLM-driven agents that each hold a role, a set of tools, and sometimes…

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA) is an attention mechanism introduced in DeepSeek-V2 and carried into DeepSeek-V3 to attack the largest memory…

Multi-Path Payments (MPP) let a single Lightning payment be split into several smaller pieces, or "shards," that travel over different…

Multi-patterning is a family of fabrication techniques that print a single chip layer using more than one exposure or deposition…

Multi-Query Attention (MQA) is a modification of the standard multi-head attention used in transformer language models. In ordinary multi-head attention,…

A multimeter is a handheld electronic instrument that measures multiple electrical quantities — DC and AC voltage, current, resistance, continuity,…

A multimodal AI model is a machine-learning system capable of processing and integrating information from multiple modalities, or types of…

Multimodal alignment is the process of mapping data from different modalities into a common representation space where semantically related items…

A multimodal model is an AI system that can process and reason over more than one type of data, such…

Multipath Payments (MPP), specified in BOLT 4, let a Lightning node split a single payment into several smaller shards and…

A multiphase buck converter is several buck (step-down) converter stages wired in parallel and switched out of phase with each…

Multisig, short for multi-signature, is a Bitcoin wallet arrangement that requires more than one key to authorize a spend. It…

MuSig2, standardized in BIP327 (merged March 2023), is a multi-signature scheme that lets several parties combine their public keys into…

The MVRV Ratio (Market Value to Realized Value) is an on-chain indicator defined as market capitalization divided by realized capitalization.…

N-gram speculation, also called prompt lookup decoding, is the simplest form of speculative decoding for large language models. Where methods…

n8n is a workflow automation platform built around a visual node editor: users connect nodes representing triggers, actions, and integrations…

Nakamoto Consensus is the consensus model introduced in the Bitcoin whitepaper, named after Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator. It lets a permissionless,…

NAND flash is a type of non-volatile solid-state memory used to store data that must survive a power cycle. On…

NCCL, the NVIDIA Collective Communications Library (pronounced "nickel"), provides the optimized routines that let multiple GPUs exchange and combine data…

The need-to-know principle holds that access to sensitive information should be granted only to those who genuinely require it to…

The needle in a haystack test is a popular evaluation of a language model's long-context recall. A single out-of-place statement,…

The NEMA 14-50 is a high-capacity North American receptacle rated 125/250V at 50 amps, with four contacts: two hot conductors,…

The NEMA 5-15 is the ordinary grounded wall outlet found throughout North American homes and offices: 125 volts, 15 amps,…

The NEMA L6-30 is a locking (twist-lock) receptacle rated 250 volts and 30 amps, carrying two hot conductors and a…

Nested SegWit, formally P2SH-P2WPKH, embeds a native SegWit output inside a Pay-to-Script-Hash wrapper. The result is an address that begins…

Network Address Translation (NAT) is a technique routers use to map an entire private network onto a single public IP…

A network effect (also called a network externality or demand-side economy of scale) occurs when the value a user derives…

The total computing power of all Bitcoin miners combined. Higher network hashrate means more competition.

NF4, or 4-bit NormalFloat, is a quantization data type introduced alongside the QLoRA fine-tuning method. It is designed around the…

A NIP, or Nostr Implementation Possibility, is a specification document that describes how a particular feature of the Nostr protocol…

NIP-05 is the Nostr standard for tying a raw public key to a human-readable, DNS-backed identifier shaped like name@domain.com. A…

NIP-07 defines a standard window.nostr object that a browser extension injects into web pages, giving websites a controlled way to…

NIP-17 specifies private direct messages on Nostr that hide not just content but the surrounding metadata. It supersedes the old…

NIP-44 is the Nostr Improvement Proposal that defines versioned, keypair-based encryption for event payloads. It exists to replace the legacy…

NIP-59 defines "gift wrapping," a three-layer construction that lets Nostr events hide not just their content but most of their…

NixOS is a free, open-source Linux distribution built on the Nix package manager and build system. Its defining idea is…

NNCP (Node to Node Copy) is a collection of utilities for secure, store-and-forward exchange of files, mail, and commands between…

No-clean flux is a soldering flux formulated to leave a small, chemically benign residue that can safely remain on the…

"No-coiner" is Bitcoin community slang for a person who holds no bitcoin and is generally skeptical or dismissive of it.…

Premium quiet fans used to replace loud stock miner fans, making home mining feasible.

Miner sound output in decibels. Stock ASICs are 75-85 dB but can be reduced to under 40 dB for home…

Every Stratum V2 connection is encrypted and authenticated by a handshake built on the Noise Protocol Framework. This is one…

Techniques to quiet mining hardware for home use: fan swaps, enclosures, immersion, and acoustic insulation.

Every ASIC ships with a nominal hashrate — the manufacturer's nameplate figure, usually quoted with a tolerance band such as…

A number miners change to produce different hash results when searching for a valid block.

Nonce reuse is one of the most dangerous failure modes in digital signatures, including the ECDSA and Schnorr schemes Bitcoin…

Nonce space - sometimes called the search space - is the full set of header values a miner is free…

Nostr — short for "Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays" — is an open protocol for decentralized social networking…

An event kind is the integer field, defined in NIP-01, that every Nostr event carries to declare what it is.…

NIP-15 defines a decentralized marketplace built directly on Nostr, letting a merchant run a storefront with nothing but a keypair…

The Outbox Model, historically called the "gossip" model, is a relay-routing strategy defined by NIP-65 that keeps Nostr decentralized as…

A Nostr relay is a simple server that accepts, stores, and forwards the cryptographically signed messages that make up the…

Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC), defined in NIP-47, is a protocol that lets a Nostr or Lightning application send commands to…

A Nostr Zap is a Lightning Network tip sent in response to a Nostr profile or note, standardized in NIP-57.…

A notification transaction is the handshake that bootstraps a BIP47 payment-code relationship. Before a sender can derive private one-time addresses…

A Neural Processing Unit (NPU) is a class of hardware accelerator designed to speed up artificial-intelligence and machine-learning workloads, especially…

npub and nsec are the two halves of a Nostr identity, encoded in a human-friendly format defined by NIP-19. The…

Nuclear-powered mining sources electricity for ASIC fleets, or for co-located compute and data-center loads, from nuclear generation. Interest has grown…

NVLink is NVIDIA's proprietary high-speed interconnect for direct GPU-to-GPU communication. When a model is too large to fit on a…

The NVT Ratio (Network Value to Transactions) is an on-chain valuation metric that divides a network's market capitalization by the…

obfs4 (the "obfourscator") is a randomizing pluggable transport that wraps a connection in a layer of specialized encryption so that…

OCEAN is a Bitcoin mining pool that launched in 2023, co-founded by Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dashjr and backed by…

Off-Grid Compute is the operation of computing workloads — Bitcoin mining, AI inference, data processing, or mesh communications — from…

Off-grid mining describes any Bitcoin mining operation that draws power from a dedicated, privately controlled source rather than from the…

An oil-filled (liquid-immersed) transformer submerges its windings and core in insulating mineral oil or ester fluid, which acts simultaneously as…

Okapi BM25 ("Best Matching 25") is a probabilistic ranking function that scores how relevant a document is to a keyword…

Ollama is an open-source platform for running large language models locally with a single command. Written mainly in Go and…

An on-load tap changer (OLTC) is a switching device built into a power transformer that adjusts the transformer's turns ratio…

On-Premise AI is AI inference and, where applicable, training infrastructure deployed within a physical facility owned or leased by the…

One-shot prompting provides a language model with exactly one worked example inside the prompt before asking it to handle the…

An onion service (historically a "hidden service") is a server — a website, a Bitcoin node, an SSH endpoint —…

Online DPO is a variant of Direct Preference Optimization in which the preference pairs used for training are generated on-policy…

ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) is a community-driven open standard for representing machine-learning models in a portable way. It defines…

An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of the concepts in a domain and the relationships that can hold between…

An opcode (operation code) is a single-byte instruction in Bitcoin Script. Each opcode tells the script interpreter to perform one…

An Open Cycle Gas Turbine (OCGT), also called a simple-cycle or peaker turbine, is the most basic form of gas-fired…

Publicly available mining firmware that can be audited, modified, and improved by the community.

Mining hardware with publicly available designs. Anyone can build, modify, and improve the hardware.

An open-weight model is one whose trained parameters, the numeric weights that constitute the model, are published for anyone to…

An operational amplifier, or op-amp, is a high-gain DC amplifier with two inputs: a non-inverting input (+) and an inverting…

Operational intensity is the metric used as the horizontal axis of the roofline model: the number of operations performed per…

Operational security, almost always shortened to OPSEC, is a systematic process for denying an adversary the information they would need…

OPSEC — operational security — is the discipline of protecting yourself by controlling the small pieces of information that, taken…

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the conversion of images of text, from scanned documents, photographs, or screenshots, into machine-encoded characters…

Optimizer state is the per-parameter bookkeeping an adaptive optimizer keeps between update steps. The Adam optimizer and its variants, the…

OP_CAT is a Bitcoin Script opcode that takes the top two items on the stack, joins them into a single…

OP_CHECKCONTRACTVERIFY (often abbreviated CCV) is a proposed, experimental Bitcoin opcode authored by Salvatore Ingala and published as BIP 443. It…

OP_CHECKLOCKTIMEVERIFY, abbreviated CLTV, is a Bitcoin Script opcode introduced in BIP 65 that lets a locking script enforce an absolute…

OP_CHECKMULTISIG (opcode 0xae) implements classic m-of-n multisignature validation in legacy Bitcoin Script. It reads a public-key count n and n…

OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY, abbreviated CSV, is a Bitcoin Script opcode defined in BIP 112 that enforces a relative timelock. Rather than a…

OP_CHECKSIG (opcode 0xac) is the workhorse signature-verification operation in Bitcoin Script. It pops two items from the stack — a…

OP_CHECKSIGADD (opcode 0xba) is the Tapscript replacement for legacy multisignature, introduced in BIP 342 alongside the Taproot upgrade. It pops…

OP_CHECKSIGFROMSTACK, abbreviated CSFS, is a proposed Bitcoin opcode described in BIP 348, with authorship credited to Brandon Black and Jeremy…

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY (CTV), specified in BIP 119 by Jeremy Rubin, is a proposed Bitcoin opcode that commits an output to a…

OP_CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY, abbreviated CTV and specified in BIP119, is a proposed Bitcoin opcode that lets an output commit, in advance, to…

OP_HASH160 (opcode 0xa9) consumes the top item on the stack, computes RIPEMD160(SHA256(x)) of that item, and pushes the resulting 20-byte…

OP_IF and its companions OP_NOTIF, OP_ELSE, and OP_ENDIF are the conditional flow-control opcodes of Bitcoin Script. They let a single…

OP_RETURN is a Bitcoin Script opcode that immediately marks the script it appears in as invalid, making any output that…

OP_SUCCESS opcodes are Tapscript's built-in upgrade hooks, defined in BIP 342 as part of the Taproot soft fork. A range…

OP_TXHASH is a proposed, experimental Bitcoin opcode described in BIP 346, authored by Steven Roose and Brandon Black. It is…

OP_VAULT is a proposed covenant opcode described in BIP 345 by James O'Beirne (later co-authored with Greg Sanders). It is…

An oracle announcement is the message an oracle publishes before an event occurs, committing in advance to sign its eventual…

An oracle attestation is the cryptographic signature an oracle publishes after a real-world event resolves, declaring which outcome actually occurred.…

The "orange pill" is a metaphor in Bitcoin culture for the moment a person begins to understand and accept Bitcoin's…

Ordinals is a numbering scheme, introduced by Casey Rodarmor in January 2023, that assigns every satoshi a unique serial number…

A valid block rejected by the network because a competing block at the same height was accepted first.

ORPO (Odds Ratio Preference Optimization) is a preference-alignment method that merges supervised fine-tuning and preference learning into one step, removing…

Outbound connection slots are the peer links a Bitcoin Core node initiates itself, as opposed to inbound connections it merely…

An output descriptor is a compact, machine-readable string that fully and unambiguously describes how a set of Bitcoin outputs can…

Output linking is the process by which blockchain analysts connect the outputs of one transaction to the inputs of later…

Output linking resistance is the property that lets a recipient accept many payments to one logical identity while a public…

Output registration is the CoinJoin phase in which each participant tells the coordinator which outputs they want the final transaction…

Running mining hardware faster than default to increase hashrate, at the cost of more power and heat.

Overfitting describes a model that has learned its training data too well, capturing not just the underlying patterns but also…

P-tuning is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that adapts a frozen language model by learning continuous prompt embeddings, but it differs…

P2PKH (Pay to Public Key Hash) is Bitcoin's original standard address type, the default wallets used from 2009 until SegWit…

P2TR (Pay to Taproot) is the output type activated by the 2021 Taproot soft fork. It is witness version 1,…

P2WPKH (Pay to Witness Public Key Hash) is the native Segregated Witness equivalent of a legacy P2PKH output, introduced with…

Package relay is a proposed enhancement to Bitcoin's peer-to-peer transaction relay, formalized as BIP-331, that lets nodes announce and evaluate…

Packet radio is a mode of sending digital data over amateur (ham) radio frequencies, packaging information into discrete frames that…

The parameter count of a machine-learning model is the total number of trainable weights it contains — the individual numbers,…

Parrot OS (Parrot Security) is a free, open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution oriented toward cybersecurity operations, privacy, and software development. It…

A BIP39 passphrase, often called the 25th word, is an optional secret you supply alongside your written seed phrase. Unlike…

Pay-to-contract is the cryptographic construction that lets a party embed an arbitrary commitment inside an ordinary-looking public key without changing…

Pay-to-EndPoint (P2EP) is the conceptual ancestor of PayJoin. It describes a payment in which the receiver contributes one or more…

Pay-to-Script-Hash, or P2SH, is a Bitcoin output type defined in BIP 16 that locks coins to the hash of a…

PayJoin — also called Pay-to-EndPoint (P2EP) and standardized in BIP-78 — is a collaborative payment in which both the sender…

A payment channel is the foundational building block of the Lightning Network. Two parties open a channel by broadcasting a…

A payment code is the static identifier at the heart of BIP47, "Reusable Payment Codes for Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets." Technically…

A PayNym is a memorable, shareable handle layered on top of a BIP47 payment code. Because a raw payment code…

The circuit board that supports and connects mining chips. The physical foundation of a hashboard.

Delamination is the separation of the bonded layers inside a printed circuit board, either between copper and laminate or between…

A PCB stackup is the layer-by-layer arrangement of copper foils and insulating dielectric materials that make up a multilayer printed…

A PCB trace is a flat copper conductor etched onto a printed circuit board that carries current or signal from…

PCI Express (PCIe) is the high-speed expansion bus that modern computers use to connect add-in cards such as graphics cards,…

A power distribution device for feeding multiple miners from one circuit with monitoring and protection.

Peak shaving is the practice of reducing a facility's highest instantaneous power demand during periods when electricity is most expensive…

A peaker plant, or "peaker," is a power station that runs only during periods of peak electricity demand, the hot…

Peer eviction logic is the routine inside Bitcoin Core, implemented as AttemptToEvictConnection(), that decides which existing inbound peer to drop…

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is an umbrella term for techniques that specialise a large language model to a new task or…

A peg-in is the act of moving bitcoin from the main chain onto a federated Bitcoin sidechain such as Liquid,…

A peg-out is the reverse of a peg-in: a participant burns Liquid Bitcoin (L-BTC) on the sidechain and receives an…

Permissionless describes a system that anyone may join and use without seeking approval from a central authority. On the Bitcoin…

A permissive license is a class of open-source license that grants broad rights to use, modify, and redistribute software while…

Perplexity is one of the oldest and most fundamental metrics for evaluating language models. It measures how well a model…

As Bitcoin's computing power grew beyond what a single machine produces, larger SI-prefixed units became necessary to describe aggregated hashrate.…

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is the original public-key encryption and signing program created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. GPG (GNU…

A phase-locked loop (PLL) is a feedback control circuit that produces an output clock whose phase and frequency are locked…

The Personal Health Information Protection Act, 2004 (PHIPA) is Ontario's provincial health privacy law, cited as S.O. 2004, Chapter 3,…

Phoenix is a self-custodial mobile Bitcoin wallet built by ACINQ that uses the Lightning Network to send and receive payments.…

Photolithography is the core patterning technique used to build integrated circuits. It works much like photographic printing: a light-sensitive chemical…

The PIC microcontroller is a small Microchip chip (commonly a PIC16F-series part) found on many conventional Antminer hashboards. Its job…

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is Canada's federal private-sector privacy law. It sets the ground rules…

Pipeline parallelism, also called vertical or inter-layer parallelism, splits a model by depth. The layers are divided into consecutive stages,…

A planar transistor is the traditional, flat MOSFET in which the source, gate, and drain all sit on a single…

The planner-executor pattern, also called plan-then-execute, is an agentic design that separates reasoning from action. A planner component first formulates…

Plausible deniability is a security property that lets you credibly deny the existence of hidden data or assets, even when…

A plenum is a sealed, pressurized air space used to distribute or collect air across a cooling system. In data…

A pluggable transport (PT) is a modular software component that reshapes the data flow between a client and an entry…

A Point Time-Locked Contract (PTLC) is a conditional Lightning Network payment that locks funds to a point on Bitcoin's elliptic…

Policy gradient is a family of reinforcement-learning methods that optimize a model's behavior, its policy, directly by following the gradient…

Bitcoin enforces two distinct layers of rules, and conflating them is a common source of confusion. Consensus rules determine whether…

A polynomial commitment scheme lets a prover publish a short commitment to a polynomial, then later prove the polynomial's value…

The percentage a pool takes from rewards. Ranges from 0-4% depending on the pool and payout method.

Pool hopping is a strategy in which a miner directs hashrate to a pool only when each submitted share is…

Pool luck is a metric that compares how many shares a pool was statistically expected to submit before finding a…

Port forwarding is a router configuration that tells your network to deliver unsolicited inbound traffic arriving on a particular port…

Position interpolation extends the usable context length of a model built on rotary position embeddings by squeezing longer position indices…

Self-attention treats a sequence as an unordered set, so a Transformer needs an explicit signal telling it where each token…

Post-mix spending is the discipline of using coins after a CoinJoin without undoing the privacy you just gained. A mix…

The electrical wiring and breaker serving mining hardware. Full-size miners often need dedicated 240V circuits.

A power distribution unit (PDU) takes one high-capacity electrical feed and divides it into many protected outlets, letting a single…

Power factor (PF) is the ratio of real power, measured in kilowatts (kW), to apparent power, measured in kilovolt-amperes (kVA),…

Power Factor Correction (PFC) is the front-end circuitry inside a switch-mode power supply that forces the current drawn from the…

Power gating is a low-power technique that completely cuts the supply voltage to a region of a chip when it…

A power plane is a continuous copper layer in a PCB stackup dedicated to carrying one supply voltage, such as…

A Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) is a long-term contract between an electricity generator (or independent power producer) and a buyer,…

Power quality describes how closely the electricity delivered to a load matches an ideal, undistorted sine wave at the correct…

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is the ratio of the total energy a facility draws from the grid to the energy…

A power whip (also called a PDU whip) is a heavy-duty, pre-assembled cable that brings power from a remote power…

A pool payout distributing actual block rewards based on shares contributed. Lower fees but more variable income.

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a policy-gradient reinforcement-learning algorithm introduced by OpenAI in 2017. It became the standard optimizer for…

A pool payout paying a fixed rate per share based on the block subsidy only, not transaction fees.

A preference dataset is the fuel for modern LLM alignment: a collection of prompts where, for each one, responses are…

The prefill phase is the first of two stages in large language model (LLM) inference. When you send a prompt,…

Prefill-decode disaggregation is a serving architecture that runs the two phases of language-model inference on physically separate hardware. The prefill…

Prefix caching is an inference optimization that reuses computation across separate requests whenever they begin with the same tokens. Many…

Prefix tuning is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that steers a frozen language model by prepending a sequence of trainable continuous…

A preheater is a bench rework tool that brings an entire circuit board up to an elevated baseline temperature before…

Pretraining is the first and most computationally expensive stage of building a large language model. The model is trained on…

Under ISO 8528, a generator set carries different power ratings depending on how it will be used, and choosing the…

The principle of least privilege (PoLP) holds that any user, account, process, or device should have only the minimum access…

A printed circuit board (PCB) is the rigid board, usually fiberglass (FR-4), with etched copper traces that both physically mount…