Bitcoin mining glossary

The words miners use, in plain English: 33 terms on hashrate, revenue, hardware, pools, power and cooling. Each has its own page.

ASIC miner: An ASIC miner is a computer built around chips that do one thing: compute SHA-256 hashes for Bitcoin mining. ASIC stands for application-specific integrated circuit.
Behind-the-meter mining: Behind-the-meter mining is mining connected directly to a power plant, taking electricity before it reaches the grid's meter.
Bitcoin halving: The halving is the cut of Bitcoin's block subsidy by half, which happens every 210,000 blocks, about every four years.
Block reward: The block reward is what the miner of a Bitcoin block collects: the block subsidy of newly created bitcoin plus the fees of every transaction in the block.
Block template: A block template is the draft block a miner hashes: the chosen transactions, the coinbase transaction and the header fields, with only the nonce left to find.
Breakeven hashprice: Breakeven hashprice is the hashprice at which a machine's revenue only just pays for its electricity. Below it the machine loses money on power alone.
Coinbase transaction: The coinbase transaction is the first transaction in every Bitcoin block. It has no inputs and creates the block reward for the miner.
Curtailment: Curtailment is a miner switching off, or turning down, on request or by choice, usually when power is scarce or expensive.
Difficulty adjustment: The difficulty adjustment is Bitcoin's automatic reset of mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, roughly every two weeks.
Exahash (EH/s): An exahash per second is one quintillion hashes per second: a million terahashes, or a thousand petahashes. It is the unit used for the whole network and for the largest miners.
Flare gas mining: Flare gas mining is generating electricity from natural gas that an oil well would otherwise burn off, and using it to mine Bitcoin at the well site.
FPPS and PPLNS: FPPS and PPLNS are the two common ways mining pools pay. FPPS pays a fixed amount for every share, fees included; PPLNS pays out only when the pool actually finds blocks.
Hashprice: Hashprice is what a fixed amount of hashrate is expected to earn in a day, usually quoted in dollars per petahash per second per day ($/PH/day). The term was introduced by Luxor.
Hashrate: Hashrate is the number of SHA-256 hash attempts a miner, a pool or the whole Bitcoin network makes each second. It is the measure of mining power.
Heat reuse: Heat reuse is capturing the heat that mining machines give off and using it for something else, such as heating buildings, greenhouses or water.
Hydro cooling: Hydro cooling is cooling mining machines with water running through cold plates fixed to the hashboards, in a sealed loop.
Immersion cooling: Immersion cooling is running mining machines submerged in a tank of non-conductive fluid, which carries the heat away instead of air.
Joules per terahash (J/TH): Joules per terahash is the efficiency of a mining machine: the energy it uses to produce one terahash. Lower is better.
Mempool: The mempool is the set of valid transactions a node has received that are not yet in a block. Every node keeps its own.
Mining difficulty: Mining difficulty is the number that sets how hard it is to find a valid Bitcoin block. The network raises or lowers it so that blocks keep arriving about every ten minutes.
Mining firmware: Mining firmware is the software that runs an ASIC miner. Aftermarket firmware replaces the manufacturer's to give the operator more control.
Mining hosting: Mining hosting, or colocation, is paying a facility to run your machines: it supplies the power, cooling, network and staff, and you own the hardware and the bitcoin.
Mining pool: A mining pool is a service that combines the hashrate of many miners and shares the block rewards among them in proportion to the work each one did.
Mining pool proxy: A mining pool proxy is software that sits between a site's machines and the pool, so thousands of miners reach the pool through a few connections.
Nonce: The nonce is the field in a Bitcoin block header that miners change, over and over, to produce a different hash each time.
Pool luck: Pool luck compares the number of blocks a pool actually found with the number its hashrate should have found. 100% is exactly as expected.
Power purchase agreement (PPA): A power purchase agreement is a long-term contract to buy electricity from a generator or supplier at agreed prices.
Proof of work: Proof of work is the rule that a Bitcoin block is only valid if its hash is below a target, which can only be achieved by spending energy on a very large number of attempts.
SHA-256: SHA-256 is the hash function Bitcoin mining uses. It turns any input into a 256-bit number that cannot be predicted without computing it.
Solo mining: Solo mining is mining without a pool: you keep the entire reward of any block you find, and you get nothing until you find one.
Stale block: A stale block is a valid block that lost the race: another block at the same height was accepted by the network first. It is often called an orphan.
Stratum: Stratum is the protocol mining machines use to talk to a pool: the pool sends work, the machine sends back shares.
Transaction fees: Transaction fees are the bitcoin that users attach to transactions to have them mined. The miner of a block keeps all the fees in it.

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