What Mining Terms Can You Learn From the ViaBTC Mining Guide?
ViaBTC’s mining guide teaches the vocabulary needed to read pool statistics without guessing. Hashrate measures computing output in TH/s or PH/s; difficulty adjusts the amount of work needed to find a valid block; shares record work submitted to a pool; rejected shares show work that was not accepted. ViaBTC currently documents PPS+ and PPLNS settlement methods, with published pool-fee rates of 4% for the PPS block-reward portion and 2% for PPLNS-related distribution as of May 2026. Bitcoin’s 2024 halving also cut its block subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, showing why reward structure matters alongside machine speed.
A useful place to start is hashrate because nearly every mining statistic connects back to computing work. A miner rated at 100 TH/s attempts about 100 trillion SHA-256 hashes each second, while a 1 PH/s setup performs 1,000 TH/s. Pool dashboards may show 10-minute, 1-hour, and 24-hour hashrate because submitted shares arrive unevenly, so a short reading can sit above or below the machine’s rated figure.
Hashrate by itself does not tell a miner how much BTC will be produced. Bitcoin changes mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks, which is roughly 14 days when blocks average close to 10 minutes. If network computing power rises while one miner stays at 100 TH/s, that miner represents a smaller share of total work after difficulty responds, so expected coin output per unit of hashrate can fall.
A machine can keep producing the same 100 TH/s while its expected BTC production changes because network difficulty, transaction fees, uptime, and pool accounting have changed.
The word “share” explains how a pool measures work before a full block appears. A share is a hash result that meets the pool’s easier target, not necessarily Bitcoin’s much harder network target. Thousands or millions of accepted shares can therefore be used to estimate how much work each worker contributed during a measurement window, even when that worker never finds a network block itself.
Share difficulty sits one level below network difficulty. A large ASIC farm may receive a higher share target so it does not flood the pool with excessive submissions, while a smaller worker may use a lower share target to keep reporting frequent enough for useful measurement. ViaBTC notes that a newly connected worker can require around 10–15 minutes before its operating status and earnings data become stable enough to review.
Accepted, rejected, and stale shares then show whether the reported hashrate is reaching the pool in usable form. If a machine locally reports 100 TH/s but only 98 TH/s appears as accepted work over a sufficiently long period, the 2% gap deserves investigation. Network latency, unstable firmware, power interruptions, excessive tuning, or outdated mining jobs can all raise rejected or stale submissions.
A single rejected-share percentage should still be read over time rather than from a few minutes of data. Five rejected shares out of 100 submissions produce a 5% reading, while the same five rejections across 10,000 submissions produce only 0.05%. Larger samples reduce the chance that a short burst of network delay is mistaken for a persistent operating problem.
The term “worker” provides the next layer of organization. A farm with 300 ASICs can assign individual worker names such as rack01-unit01 through rack10-unit30, making it easier to compare machine-level hashrate, uptime, and rejection rates. ViaBTC’s mining interface supports worker monitoring, hashrate alerts, miner grouping, and watcher functions, which are useful once an operation grows beyond a few devices.
Mining pools exist because solo block discovery has high statistical variance. A miner controlling 0.001% of network hashrate has only about one hundred-thousandth of the expected block-finding share over a long period, so actual solo payments may be separated by long intervals. Pooling combines work from many miners and distributes payments according to an accounting method rather than asking every small operator to wait for an individually found block.
That is where PPS+ and PPLNS become important terms in the ViaBTC Crypto Mining environment. ViaBTC’s May 20, 2026 documentation states that PPS+ pays the block-reward portion using PPS accounting and handles transaction-fee distribution through a PPLNS-based method. The published fee schedule on that page lists 4% for the PPS block-reward portion and 2% for the transaction-fee portion.
| Term | What the miner is measuring | Useful number to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Hashrate | Computing work per second | TH/s, PH/s, EH/s |
| Difficulty | Network work required for a valid block | Adjustment every 2,016 BTC blocks |
| Accepted share | Work recognized by the pool | Accepted share count |
| Rejected share | Submitted work not credited | Rejection percentage |
| PPS+ | Payment based partly on theoretical share output | ViaBTC publishes 4% on PPS block rewards |
| PPLNS | Payment tied more closely to pool block results | ViaBTC publishes 2% |
| Uptime | Time equipment remains productive | 95%, 99%, 99.9% |
PPS accounting reduces short-period payment variation for the miner because qualifying work receives a theoretical block-reward amount based on submitted shares and current difficulty. ViaBTC states that its PPS+ block-reward portion is distributed every hour according to current difficulty. A miner therefore does not need the pool to find blocks at perfectly regular intervals for every hourly block-reward calculation.
PPLNS behaves differently because actual block discovery has more influence over payment timing and amount. ViaBTC documents a 2% PPLNS fee and states that reward calculations use a miner’s share of pool hashrate over the previous five difficulty rounds after a block reaches six confirmations. A week with unusually frequent pool blocks can therefore look different from a week with fewer blocks, even when a miner’s hashrate stays unchanged.
Pool “luck” is the vocabulary used for that statistical variation. If expected block production over a period is 100 blocks but the pool finds 108, actual production reached 108% of expectation; if it finds 92, the figure is 92%. Short periods can differ substantially from expectation because proof-of-work block discovery is probabilistic rather than scheduled.
The reward itself should also be separated into block subsidy and transaction fees. Bitcoin’s April 2024 halving reduced the subsidy from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block, a 50% cut in newly issued BTC paid to miners. Transaction fees are added separately and vary with network usage, so two blocks carrying the same 3.125 BTC subsidy can still have different total miner compensation.
A simple numerical example shows why fee terminology matters. If one block contains a 3.125 BTC subsidy plus 0.25 BTC in transaction fees, gross block compensation is 3.375 BTC; fees account for about 7.4% of that amount. If fees rise to 1 BTC while the subsidy stays 3.125 BTC, the fee share rises to roughly 24.2%.
ViaBTC also documents merged mining, where compatible proof-of-work can produce additional coin rewards without assigning a second physical hashrate stream to another miner. Its August 2026 documentation says BTC mining can also distribute NMC and FB under supported PPS+ or PPLNS arrangements, while LTC mining can distribute DOGE, BELLS, PEP, and DINGO under supported conditions.
Merged-mining amounts should not be treated as fixed bonuses. ViaBTC states that FB rewards use PPLNS distribution and have no fixed distribution ratio, so the amount can vary with real hashrate and block results. A miner comparing two 30-day periods should therefore separate primary-coin production from secondary merged-mining payments instead of assuming every terahash produces a constant secondary-coin amount.
Hardware efficiency adds an operating-cost layer to the mining vocabulary. An ASIC producing 200 TH/s at 3,500 W uses 17.5 joules per terahash, while another producing the same 200 TH/s at 4,500 W uses 22.5 J/TH. The second machine consumes about 28.6% more electricity for the same nominal hashrate.
Electricity pricing turns that efficiency gap into money. A 3.5 kW miner running for 24 hours consumes 84 kWh per day; at $0.08 per kWh, electricity costs $6.72 per day, or about $201.60 over a 30-day month. At $0.12 per kWh, the same machine costs $10.08 per day, a 50% increase caused entirely by the electricity rate.
Uptime changes the result again. A 200 TH/s miner running at 100% uptime contributes up to 4,800 TH-hours of nominal work per day, while 95% uptime reduces that to about 4,560 TH-hours. Five percentage points of downtime can therefore remove roughly 240 TH-hours of daily productive capacity before rejected shares are considered.
ViaBTC lists power supply, internet access, cooling equipment, temperature, and humidity control among the infrastructure needed for proof-of-work mining. Its May 2026 beginner guide also states that phones do not provide the dedicated hashrate required for the mining process described there, while ASIC families such as Antminer, WhatsMiner, and Avalon are listed for BTC mining.
A miner reading a pool page can therefore connect the vocabulary in a fixed order: machine-rated hashrate, pool-estimated hashrate, accepted shares, rejected percentage, network difficulty, settlement method, block subsidy, transaction fees, pool fee, electricity use, and uptime. If rated hashrate is 200 TH/s, accepted hashrate averages 194 TH/s, and rejected work accounts for 3%, the first question belongs to equipment or connectivity rather than Bitcoin’s 2024 subsidy schedule.
ViaBTC’s own 2026 help material lists hashrate fluctuation, difficulty adjustment, halving events, and payment method as separate reasons mining output can change. It also describes PPS+ as more stable than PPLNS over shorter periods because PPLNS depends more heavily on blocks actually found by the pool. A comparison covering 30 or 90 days is therefore more informative than judging a payment method from one afternoon of data.
Withdrawal vocabulary matters after mining income reaches the account. ViaBTC documented four withdrawal routes in May 2026: Auto Withdraw, Normal Transfer, Inter-User Transfer, and Transfer to CoinEx. Its help page states that Auto Withdraw is processed once per day, while normal transfers can be made at other times with a fee, so payment timing should not be confused with the hourly mining-settlement schedule.
For a 30-day operating review, a miner can record average accepted TH/s, rejection percentage, electricity consumed, pool fee, BTC credited, transaction-fee income, merged-mining credits, and downtime hours in one table. Comparing those fields month over month separates a 10% network-difficulty increase from a 10% hardware-output loss, two situations that can look similar when only daily BTC credited is checked.
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