Please consider enabling VARDIFF or getting the server to set a lower diff when mining faster coins, I'm sure it will make everyone more money, including yourself h2odysee.
There are more important things to work on. I will at some point do a better low diff test. But some things need to come first.
If you want me to make that a priority, then you can explain logically why having a lower diff would increase profits. So far, most explanations seem to fail by misunderstanding what a share exactly is.
Also, there is a coin that has a 42% rejection rate, but it's still sometimes the most profitable, even with that included. So it's ok when you see that high of a rejection rate.
It's not just a matter of upgrading servers. It would take a significant amount of time for me to rework the code to include diffs other than 512. And, I would need to do some more database optimizations, because that's where the slowdown will occur.
Hi H2O,
I agree with you that difficulty does not affect rejects, and it does not affect profit. The only thing that should affect rejects is how often blocks are changing, how quickly your server notifies us, and how quickly we submit shares to you.
The purpose of using a lower difficulty is to increase the accuracy that your server considers us to be working (ie, variance). As difficulty goes up, the variance between what your server considers our hashrate to be, and our actual hashrate, increases.
Over the long haul, pool difficulty is meaningless. I may get lucky and produce more 512+ difficulty shares than statistics would suggest (where my MH/s on your server would show higher than reality), or unlucky (where my MH/s on your server would show lower than reality). Over enough time, it should all even out.
As an extreme example, we could say that, over the long-haul, solo mining BTC (super high difficulty) is just as profitable as pool mining BTC (low difficulty). Probably even more profitable because there would be no pool fees. But pools exist to share the luck over many people, reducing individual variance.
So who is to say what a reasonable difficulty is that balances server load with the desire for low variance? Well obviously that's your call, and the ideal is vardiff to set low difficulty for smaller rigs and high difficulty for larger rigs. But your 512 difficulty is well out of the norm for smaller rigs.
Sidenote: I really do like your pool, I don't mean to be difficult (no pun intended). But you asked for a logical argument for lowering difficulty, so there you are