Topic: Trying to understand stratum diff, network diff, submitted diff (Read 128 times)

This is true, but for different mining difficulties you need to select different ports for mining, and the rest everything works automatically. This makes sense when you have powerful graphics cards to get extra profit. Since I’ve been using hot video cards lately, I have mining by default.
look
https://neuropool.net/#getting_started

Some pools offer fixed diff ports but vardiff is most common. In my experience with CPU mining being able to set the starting diff is very convenient.
Many pools won't adjust until you actually submit at least one share so if the starting diff is way too high for your miner you're stuck.

The typical target for most pools is around 5 shares per minute. Vardiff pools also have a minimum difficulty, a weak miner may hit that limit and submit
fewer shares than the target. Five minutes without a share is likely to result in a stratum timeout and means you should probably find something else to
mine or mine with.

You can find the math here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty

I have never set any difficulty for pools in the past. I know many pools have this option but it’s pointless since all pools usually automatically adjust for the most optimal difficulty.

Usually 1 share per minute. If you haven’t sent a share in a while they will lower the difficult and if you send too many shares they will raise it.

They don’t want too many shares because it would clog the pool and make it slower.

Usually, for the convenience of mining altcoins on pools, you can set several difficulty options depending on your video cards. High difficulty is usually used for powerful video cards, but if you have a mid-range video card, then the difficulty settings are usually set to default.

I think I can relate the stratum server's difficulty to the network difficulty, roughly.

By experimenting with the setting I found setting it at 1 and too many useless shares came in, and adjusting a bit higher, and there would have been maybe 20 to 50 shares submitted before finding a block.  (The network doesn't have a great amount of hashpower, there's only a few miners).  So that seemed to be a good setting.  It's low enough for all CPU miners to find shares and share the block reward, but not too high so that miners only find shares once in a while.  It seems to be mainly for filtering out low shares, and is set by the pool, and might be updated at a later time if needed.

So stratum difficulty is just set by pools and reflects the kinds of hardware and software used and how many miners there are, and is low enough so that all miners with adequate hashpower can share in blocks found.

All the different difficulty numbers were getting confusing, especially because they are all expressed a bit differently.  I can see it more clearly now, I just have to jump back and forth between difficulty numbers expressed in hex, as whole numbers and as floating point numbers.  I suppose with the numbers below zero it just means with difficulty_1_target / current_target - over time (unusually) the current target is higher than the difficulty_1_target maybe.

Thanks for your reply!

Basically since you are mining with a pool, you don't need to submit the actual difficulty of finding a block on the network. For example the Bitcoin difficulty is crazy high and impossible to find for a single miner. So the pool needs to send you work that is a much much smaller difficulty. And the only reason they do this is to prove that you are actually hashing and trying to find the block.

The shares you send is called work difficulty and the actual difficulty of the network is called the network difficulty. And submitted diff is the difficulty of the share you found. Usually its larger than work difficulty.

Hope this helps.

Hi everyone,

Can someone enlighten me on the meaning of the stratum difficulty set by a mining pool, e.g. 32, and the network difficulty (reported as 0.02... the network has  500kh/s thereabouts, not sure if that's accurate though), and the difficulty my miner is reporting and when shares are accepted?  These are below 0.02, usually around 0.005 and less).

I can't find anywhere that explains what these difficulty numbers are and how to think about them in terms of the target hash, if that's what you do with difficulty.

I have read the stratum diff simply filters out work submitted which doesn't meet requirements, but I am not sure why the stratum diff would be set at a certain number, and how this relates to the network difficulty.  If the network diff is reasonably low and it's possible to find blocks every few hours solo mining, how would a mining pool know to set a stratum diff that agrees with the network diff?  Why would they be different?

Thanks for any help.