Glossary

Uptime

1 min read

Generally, uptime measures a system’s reliability and is expressed as a percentage of time that a system has been operational over the period of potential operating time.

In the context of Bitcoin, a mining machine’s uptime refers to the amount of time an ASIC has been hashing out of all the time it could have been hashing.

Miners are incentivized to maintain as high a level of uptime as possible because any downtime reduces potential profitability.

Related Terms
Mining
Mining is the process of building the blockchain by adding new blocks one at a time. Most of mining involves finding a valid Proof-of-Work, which is an energy-intensive guessing game.
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Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC)
An Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) is a special electronic chip built for exactly one purpose. Bitcoin ASIC miners, the hardware devices that contain these chips, are designed solely to hash blocks in order to find a valid Proof-of-Work.
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Hash Function
A cryptographic hash function is a one-way, random mathematical function. Hash functions underlie Bitcoin's security model in several ways.
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Hash Rate
Hash rate is a measure of how many hashes miners cumulatively produce per second on the Bitcoin network. The hash rate indicates how much money, energy, and computing power is being dedicated to processing transactions and securing the network.
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