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Rebuilding a decade of writing

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Plain-English writing on the stack, mining, security and the GCC project. A decade-deep archive, being rebuilt and reorganised here after my last site went down. No paywall, no popups, no AI-generated filler.

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asic pplns monero hardware wallet electricity uk

Editor's pick · this week

Mining tutorial Featured
./asic-bench --model s21-pro
nominal: 234 TH/s
measured: 218 TH/s · 93% of spec
power: 3,460W ± 4%
efficiency: 15.9 J/TH
firmware: official v2.4.1 · no lock-in detected
./energy --kwh 0.18 --hours 24
draw: 83.0 kWh/day
electricity: £14.96/day @ £0.18/kWh
noise: 76 dB @ 1m
resale: check firmware lock before you buy
testnet demo · coins have no monetary value
hardware benchmark

May 18, 2026 · 9 min read

Choosing your first ASIC in 2026: what actually matters.

Wattage per terahash is the obvious metric. The non-obvious ones — firmware lock-in, resale value, electricity contracts, noise floor — are what burn newcomers. I benchmarked four current-gen miners against their spec sheets, and the gap is uncomfortable.

TL;DR

  • Spec sheets lie by ~7% in the real world
  • Firmware lock-in is the silent risk
  • Electricity and noise decide the build, not headline hashrate
S

Steven

@StevenJTobin

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Archive

Everything I've published.

sort:
GCC updates

How to launch your own cryptocurrency in 2026.

Jun 22, 2026 16 min read
GCC updates

What's actually in a white-label crypto stack.

Jun 22, 2026 14 min read
GCC updates

What it costs to create your own coin.

Jun 22, 2026 15 min read
Security

A field guide to seed phrase storage that won't get you robbed

May 11, 2026 14 min read

$ ./bench --rig 5

> hashrate ok

> uptime 14d 2h

> settled (testnet)

> ok

GCC updates

Testnet retrospective: 4 weeks, 3 forks, one good idea.

May 4, 2026 11 min read
Market

Reading on-chain data: what the charts actually show.

Apr 27, 2026 8 min read

$ ./bench --rig 7

> hashrate ok

> uptime 14d 2h

> settled (testnet)

> ok

Mining tutorial

Switching from PPS+ to PPLNS without losing a settlement cycle.

Apr 20, 2026 6 min read
Hardware review

Seven budget GPUs, benchmarked on the testnet demo.

Apr 13, 2026 12 min read
Security

How a Monero theft happened (and the one thing that would've stopped it).

Apr 6, 2026 15 min read
GCC updates

Why the GCC demo chain runs on Scrypt.

Mar 30, 2026 7 min read
Opinion

Pool centralisation is the boring crypto risk no-one wants to talk about.

Mar 23, 2026 5 min read

$ ./bench --rig 12

> hashrate ok

> uptime 14d 2h

> settled (testnet)

> ok

Mining tutorial

A printable mining checklist for solo operators (PDF inside).

Mar 16, 2026 4 min read
showing all 13 posts · more from the archive coming
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