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Topic: Someone please explain minimum difficulty and shares (Read 4642 times)

legendary
Activity: 4256
Merit: 8551
'The right to privacy matters'
As a little bit off topic. the s-1    is from 90 to 100 U-2 sticks in hash power.

 So if you point it at a pool it earns money every day as of now it earns more then the power it burns.


the U-2  hardly earns any thing in a day.  try to learn to solo mine with it.  it will cost under 2 watts an hour.

if you teach yourself solo mining  a u-2 would be very low cost endless lottery ticket.

   the up front fee and the 2 watts an hour give you a chance to get a block each and every block .

 A small chance but a chance.  right now a block is 25 coins  which is about 11000 usd.

the odds of winning a block with only 2gh today are about 200,000 to 1.


I have 2th or 1000 u-2 sticks I mine almost all of my hash at btcguild pool, but I do send 1 u-2 stick out as a solo

miner.
hero member
Activity: 667
Merit: 500
1)

Minimum share difficulty is a method of reducing the bandwidth required to communicate shares to the pool.

The probability of finding a share of any given difficulty is predictable as a function of how much hashing power your "worker" has. If say a worker mining at hundreds of GH/s were to be mining strictly difficulty 1, it would be spamming the pool continuously with shares. Instead, by mining at a higher difficulty, the average time between finding valid shares is increased, but the pool compensates you more per share commensurate to the difficulty your worker is set to.

There is a tradeoff at work here because a worker set to a lower difficulty is going to have lower variance at the expense of higher bandwidth requirements, versus a higher difficulty which minimizes bandwidth required but introduces a higher probability of variance in average time between valid shares. There's a pretty uncontroversial sweet spot calculation that you can find all over these boards on various thread about this exact topic.

What your workers are automatically set to is already correct.

2)

Best share means exactly what you're saying, but in practice when you're pool mining it doesn't make any difference, because either your pool finds a block or it doesn't, and you get paid by shares whether it's you or someone else.
hero member
Activity: 556
Merit: 500
I just started mining this week and if there's a source you can point me to, great, but if not can someone please answer the following questions?

1. I have an Antminer U2 and an Antminer S1 mining through the BTCGuild pool. The S1 is set at a minimum difficulty of 128 and the U2 is set at 2 (does anyone recommend anything different?). The only thing I understand here is that you raise the minimum difficulty for the faster device, but what does that really mean in terms of the difference of what my miners are actually doing?

2. For example, so far my U2 has a best share of 830k. Does this mean anything? Is this a measure of the 'closest' the miner has come to finding a block? Does it mean anything as far as the pool or does it contribute to finding a block or is it just a useless but interesting stat?

TIA.
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