Four stations carry a block from proposal to heat. Select a numbered marker on the drawing, or pick a deck from the list.
Interactive cross-section
Sheet 1 of 1Longitudinal sectionNot to scale
At anchor
Nothing selected yet
Choose a station to read what happens there and which number it connects to. A good order is the one a block follows: energy arrives, machines hash, the node checks, heat leaves.
Keyboard: Tab to a marker or list item and press Enter. With a list item focused, the arrow keys move between decks. Escape clears the selection.
Ship’s logbook
Four decks, in more detail
Follow the path of a day: energy arrives, machines hash, the node checks, heat leaves. The drawing is a diagram, not a design. These notes say what each station is for and where the numbers on the other pages come from.
Deck 01
Sun deck Energy
Electricity is the running cost that never stops. Power is measured in watts, energy in kilowatt-hours: a 3,000 W machine left on for one hour consumes 3 kWh, and a bill multiplies that by your tariff. In the voyage model the price per kWh is an input, because no single number is true for everyone.
Supplies vary from a household grid connection to a dedicated solar array or a metered industrial feed. The arithmetic is the same for all of them. Whatever the source, check that your wiring and breakers are rated for a heavy, continuous load before you plug anything in.
Deck 02
Engine room Hashers
The hashers are purpose-built machines that perform one calculation, the double SHA-256 of a candidate block header, at enormous speed. Their output is a stream of hashes, almost all of which fail the target. Success comes from steady volume, not from any single attempt.
Two numbers describe a machine: hashrate, in terahashes per second, and efficiency, in joules per terahash. Divide the power draw in watts by the hashrate in TH/s and you have the efficiency. A general-purpose computer can compute the same hash but delivers far less work per watt, which is why dedicated hardware took over.
Deck 03
Bridge Node and pool
A full node is the vessel’s judgement. It receives blocks and transactions from its peers, checks each against the consensus rules, keeps the UTXO set up to date and refuses anything that does not comply. That is true whether or not you mine; mining simply adds a duty to propose blocks of your own.
If you point hardware at a pool, the pool coordinates the block template and credits each machine for the small proofs of effort, called shares, that it submits. Payout schemes and fees differ between pools, so read the terms before you connect. Solo mining is possible too, and the Voyage page shows how long the gaps between wins can be at a small share of the network.
Deck 04
The hold Cooling
A mining machine converts nearly every watt it draws into heat. Cooling is therefore not an accessory but half of the design: whatever energy comes in on the sun deck has to leave through the hold. One watt of continuous load is about 3.41 BTU per hour of heat.
Air systems move that heat with fans and ducting; liquid and immersion systems carry it away in a fluid and shed it elsewhere. Intake temperature, dust and noise are the practical limits, particularly in a home. Used well, the heat can warm a room, though the calculators here do not count that as a credit.
Reading across
One table for the whole vessel
Each deck, the part of mining it stands for, the units you will meet there and the question it answers
Deck
Part of mining
Units you will meet
Question it answers
Sun deck
Energy
W, kWh, cost per kWh
What does a day of running cost?
Engine room
Hashers
TH/s, J/TH
How much work is done, and at what energy cost?
Bridge
Node and pool
blocks, shares
What counts as valid work, and who is credited for it?