BTChub · Glossary
The terms, in plain language
Every piece of jargon this site leans on, defined plainly — what each term is, never what it predicts. In articles, these same definitions appear on hover; here they all live in one place.
- 10-year Treasury yield
- What lending to the US government for ten years pays each year, the benchmark safe return that other assets, bitcoin included, are weighed against.
- 200-week moving average1.23×
- The average closing price over the last 200 weeks (~4 years) — a slow baseline that has historically sat near full-cycle bottoms.
- 5GW
- Fifth-generation warfare — conflict waged through information, finance, and infrastructure rather than open battle.
- breakeven power price
- The most a miner can pay for electricity and still cover it from what its machines earn. Below it, running pays; above it, switching off saves money. Electricity only.
- broad dollar index
- The Federal Reserve's measure of the US dollar against the currencies of the countries the US trades with. Up means a stronger dollar.
- cold storage
- Keeping keys on a device that never touches the internet, putting them out of reach of remote attackers.
- cost basis
- What you actually paid, on average, for the bitcoin you hold — the reference point for gains, losses, and tax.
- cost of production$63k
- An estimate of the electricity cost to mine one bitcoin, from difficulty and rig efficiency. A soft, reflexive floor — not a hard one.
- curtail
- To switch machines off on purpose, usually because power costs more than they earn or the grid is short of supply. Miners can do it in minutes.
- cycle score
- A 0–100 composite that places today's six valuation indicators on their own historical bands. Descriptive position, not a forecast.
- difficulty140.6 T
- A protocol setting that adjusts every ~2 weeks to keep blocks arriving about every 10 minutes, rising and falling with hashrate.
- dollar-cost averaging
- Buying a fixed amount on a fixed schedule regardless of price, to smooth out the risk of buying everything at the wrong moment.
- drawdown
- How far price sits below its highest close so far, as a percentage. A plain measure of damage — it says nothing about direction.
- ERCOT
- The Electric Reliability Council of Texas: the operator of most of Texas's power grid and its wholesale electricity market, home to many US Bitcoin miners.
- halving
- The protocol event, about every four years, that cuts the new-bitcoin block reward in half. The next drops it to 1.5625 BTC.
- hashprice$36.7 / PH/day
- What a miner earns per unit of hashpower per day — revenue divided by hashrate. It falls as competition rises or price drops.
- hashrate1,030 EH/s
- The total computing power securing the Bitcoin network, in hashes per second — a measure of how much work backs the chain.
- Henry Hub
- The US benchmark price for natural gas, set at a pipeline hub in Louisiana, quoted in dollars per MMBtu (million British thermal units).
- hub price
- The wholesale price of electricity at a trading point on the grid, reset every 5 to 15 minutes. Large buyers like miners pay close to it; households pay a fixed retail rate.
- J/TH
- Joules per terahash: how much electricity a mining machine burns for each unit of work. Lower is more efficient. New machines are around 15–20; older ones 30 or more.
- LMP
- Locational marginal price: the wholesale price of power at one point on the grid, set every few minutes by the costliest plant needed to meet demand there.
- Mayer Multiple1.13×
- Bitcoin's price divided by its 200-day moving average — a quick gauge of how stretched price is above or below its long-run trend.
- mempool
- The waiting room of unconfirmed transactions. When it fills, the fee to get into the next block rises.
- multisig
- A wallet that needs several keys to spend (e.g. 2 of 3), so no single lost or stolen key can drain it on its own.
- MWh
- Megawatt-hour, 1,000 kWh: the unit wholesale power is priced in. $76 per MWh is 7.6¢ per kWh, the unit on a household bill.
- net load
- Grid demand minus what wind and solar supply: what the rest of the fleet, mostly gas, has to cover. When it is high, power usually gets pricier.
- OpSec
- Operational security — the habits that keep your holdings and identity from leaking: address reuse, oversharing, metadata, physical safety.
- PH/s
- Petahashes per second: a quadrillion guesses a second, the unit for a fleet of mining machines. One current machine does about 0.2 PH/s (200 TH/s).
- Pi-Cycle Top48%
- A top-spotting signal: the 111-day average against twice the 350-day average. Their crossover has lined up with past cycle peaks.
- power law
- The observation that Bitcoin's price has grown roughly as a fixed power of its age, tracing a straight line on a log-log chart. A descriptive fit, not a law.
- Puell Multiple1.05×
- Daily mining issuance value (new coins × price) divided by its own 365-day average — a proxy for how rich or lean miner revenue is right now.
- retarget140.6 T
- The difficulty reset: every 2,016 blocks (about two weeks) Bitcoin re-tunes how hard mining is, so blocks keep coming about every 10 minutes.
- RSI58
- Relative Strength Index — a 0–100 momentum gauge. High readings suggest overbought, low oversold; here it's read on a weekly clock.
- sat/vB
- Satoshis per virtual byte — the fee rate you attach to a transaction. Higher rates get confirmed sooner when the mempool is busy.
- self-custody
- Holding your own bitcoin keys rather than trusting an exchange or custodian. The maxim: not your keys, not your coins.
- UTXO
- Unspent Transaction Output — a discrete chunk of bitcoin sitting at an address, the accounting unit the protocol actually tracks.
Missing a term? The site defines what it can trace to a number or a mechanism — if something here still reads like code, that’s a gap worth telling us about.