A mining central processing unit (CPU) is a small heater that happens to hash. Watts are how fast electricity goes in. Almost every watt comes back out as heat. The fan does not destroy it. The fan moves it into the room. If the room is warm, the chip starts warmer too. Temperature is not the…

First published July 5, 2018 Came across this essay on the internets, hope it educates you the reader as much as it educated me. I admit I used to believe in Bitcoin. I was one of its most naïve and vehement apologists to friends, family members, and complete strangers (online). This was all before…

We all know the idea of separating money from the state. The Myth of the Rule of Law by John Hasnas was the first time I saw someone try the harder cut IRL (non-fiction): separating law / lawmaking from the state. (The real first time I ran into the idea was in Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh…

Okay so this one confused me for a while. I keep seeing it confuse people who just started hashing. Your chip has cores. The OS and the miner also show threads. On a Ryzen those counts are not the same. A 6-core chip shows 12 threads. A 16-core chip shows 32. The extras are SMT. That is AMD's name…