Stratum jobs can be used infinitely, until the block is invalid or the pool expires the job. Unlike getwork, there is no 232 nonce limit.
True. But there is a limit to ntime. If a pool were to hash a stratum job ad nauseam and finally solve it, and then submit it, it would be rejected based on ntime (being some large time into the future). Stratum doesn't roll ntime and thus depends on the pool pushing new work requests.
Well, if you can't roll ntime (sounds like a major flaw to me), you'd just keep using the same one until you found the block. So if anything, it'd be too
old. But Bitcoin itself doesn't care what ntime is as long as it is greater than or equal to the median of the last 10 blocks - in other words, the ntime the pool gives you the first time for each new block remains valid.
Perhaps slush could clarify the current meaning
I don't understand what is unclear here.
a) clean_jobs=False means that previous jobs are still valid.
b) clean_jobs=True means that previous jobs become invalid.
c) If new work is received, miner automatically should use this job. There's no reason why to add a new flag to specify this, it is "by default". However miners can do whatever they want, because with or without a special flag, previous jobs are still valid.
KISS, please.
Ok, so that seems to agree with conman's interpretation somewhat. How do pools say "previous job remain valid for N more seconds"? It's unreasonable to expect pools to accept shares on previous jobs indefinitely, and also harmful to miners to discard shares across the change-over period. In short, there seems to be
no possible way to implement the 2 minute expiration over stratum...
How do pools say "previous jobs shouldn't be used, but please submit them anyway"? This was an important fix added to getwork longpolling to correct pool-side statistics as well as avoid losing merged mining shares in some cases.
I've read a certain number of posts from Kano speaking of these problems with Stratum now.
Kano's problem is just one of many...
If I believe Kano,
Sounds like a pretty bad idea.
(because GBT has too much stales)
This is either a myth or a cgminer bug.