THE ENGINE ROOM

The mining core

easyBTX is one button. Behind it, something has to actually do the arithmetic that secures a BTX block, and on two of the three platforms that something was written by someone else. This page says who, where it comes from, and what it costs, because a one-click miner that is vague about its own engine has not earned the click.

What the work is

Since the MatMul v4.7 fork at block 185,000, one mining attempt is an episode: four rounds of a sixteen-layer network 4,096 values wide, roughly 141 trillion multiply-accumulate operations, needing about 4.8 GB of GPU memory. It is indivisible. You cannot half-do one and you cannot make a cheap guess, which is the entire point of the design. An engine's whole job is to run that computation, bit-exactly, as fast as the hardware allows.

Bit-exactly is the hard part. Every machine must produce an identical digest from the same inputs, so an engine that is merely fast and slightly wrong is worse than useless: it burns your electricity and every share is rejected.

MATADOR, on NVIDIA

On Linux and on Windows through WSL2, easyBTX runs MATADOR, a CUDA engine published at github.com/vanities/matador-miner. It is not ours and it is not bundled. easyBTX fetches it on first use and verifies it against the checksum the vendor publishes alongside it, over TLS.

MATADOR charges 1% of mining time, on top of easyBTX's own 4.99% and whatever the pool takes. On an NVIDIA platform that is three fees, and the FAQ states the arithmetic in full.

It also sets the hardware floor. When the work function changed, MATADOR withdrew every build for Pascal, Volta and Turing cards, with the plain explanation that the new proof of work needs Ampere-or-newer tensor cores. So the practical requirement today is an RTX 30-series card or later. easyBTX detects an older card, stops, and says why, rather than restarting forever and letting you wonder.

On Apple silicon, a different engine

A Mac does not run MATADOR. easyBTX drives a Metal solver distributed through a channel file, and pins a specific build per release, checked against a compiled-in list of hashes it has actually tested. A channel that points somewhere outside that list is reported to us and never installed onto the consensus path automatically.

That policy is not theoretical caution. It exists because the channel once served two wrong solvers in a single night, and because an earlier release shipped a pin that was roughly three times slower than it should have been. Both are recorded in the source that implements the rule.

Whether a given Mac can mine at all is settled by measurement rather than a model number: the app hands the GPU a computation whose answer it already knows and admits the machine only if every byte comes back identical. There is no chip allowlist, and there used to be one that was wrong.

The alternative engine, and a counterfeit

There is a second NVIDIA engine, btx-rc-miner, which charges no fee of its own. easyBTX does not default to it and does not claim it is faster, because on the card we measured it was about 1.5 times slower than MATADOR. Its own release publishes checksums.

One thing worth knowing if you ever download an engine yourself: a build has circulated on Telegram that matches no published checksum, is an older version than it claims, and whose launcher quietly falls back to the vendor's payout address when none is configured. That is what an unverified miner binary looks like when it is not working for you. Check the checksum, every time, whoever you got it from.

Why we tell you this

Because you are about to run a binary that computes for money on your own hardware, and because the checks above are only worth something if you know they exist. Everything on this page can be read in easyBTX's own source and in the vendors' own release pages. If any of it stops being true, the research archive is where we correct ourselves in public.

BTX has no established public market. Mining may earn you nothing, and roughly 6.5% to 8.5% of your mining time goes to fees before the electricity. Nothing here is financial advice.