What's going on cryptocurrency Universe, it’s The Bitcoin Miner. In this one I’m down in the “dungeon” talking about something a lot of people ignore: the USB-C power cable. If you’re building a phone mining farm or stacking Orange Pi 5 SBCs at scale, the cable you choose actually matters. I tested a pile of cables that looked identical (and even came from different sellers with different listings), and a bunch of them were basically the same junk once they showed up. The big issue is resistance—undersized or low-quality cables waste power, run hotter, and just don’t seem to last. I tested mostly 6-foot cables using a kilowatt meter at the wall with a single Orange Pi on a power brick, then averaged the wattage. The best cables landed around 9.0W at the wall, while the worst cheap eBay cables hit about 9.8W—0.8W difference per device. That doesn’t sound like much until you scale to 100 boards and you’re burning an extra ~80W for no reason. My takeaway: don’t bother with the super cheap cables, look for thicker diameter cable, and stick to 6-foot when you can—3-foot wasn’t meaningfully better, but 10-foot definitely got worse even on “good” cables.