Topic: When your miner loses internet connection, progress is paused and then resumed.. (Read 960 times)

Your miner also needs to regularly get new work from the pool. You are given a certain amount of hashes to do, which is based on an assembled block that the pool wants to add to the blockchain. As soon as there is a new blockchain block made by anyone, or the pool adds some more transactions to the block they are creating, your offline work is obsolete.

Not any more.  Every 210,000 blocks (roughly 4 years at constant hashrate) the subsidy is cut in half.  It was 50, it is now 25, at block 420,000 it will be 12.5 ....

A block is 50 btc?

Pools use the losing hashes as proof.  The pool is estimating your share of the block reward when a block is found.  If you contribute 1% of the losing hashes/tickets then (simplified) you will get 1% of a reward when a block is found.   Now the pool overall might be lucky or unlucky so it might take longer or shorter for the pool to get paid but by counting your tickets vs entire pools tickets the pool can ensure a) that you are actually working, and b) what "share" you should get.   Depending on the pool the "confirmed" reward is likely your share of blocks which have already been found but the pool is waiting for it to mature.  The "unconfirmed" reward is your share of the current block miners are looking for a solution to.  If the pool is PPS then the pool is simply paying you a flat fee per losing ticket.  The pool is taking all the risk and when a block is found faster they get more than they payout and when a block is found slower they payout more than they get.  This is why the fee is generally higher for PPS.

To use the lottery ticket analogy imagine you and your friends make a lottery pool you all buy lottery tickets but you can't be together for the drawing, you don't even know when you will get a winner.  So you all buy tickets (some can buy more, some can buy less) and everyone saves their losing tickets.  Now the losing tickets are worthless but they are proof you helped the pool.  When someone wins the lottery everyone comes together and everyone's losing tickets are counted.   If since the last winner you bought 120 tickets and the combined total for everyone was 12,000 tickets then you would get 1% of the jackpot regardless of who actually bought the jackpot ticket.   Note: don't do this in real life without cryptography this is a very bad setup and very easy for the winner to just walk away with the winning ticket or broke players to grab old losing tickets from the trash to pad their stats.   In mining however the use of cryptography means you can't cheat, but the general concept of using losing tickets/hashes as proof of contributing still applies.

but wait, why is there a confirmed reward number that goes up progressively in pool websites?

ok, thanks for clearing that up

Yes. Note that there is no "progress" concept, each hash is indipendent from the others. It's a lottery, every ticket is indipendent.

there is no concept of "progress" in mining. there has been many threads on this so I recommend you search those threads for a detailed explanation.

There is no progress so there is nothing to lose or nothing to resume.

Each hash is like a lottery ticket.   It either solves the block or it is a loser.   Buying and losing with 1000 lottery tickets doesn't make you "closer" to winning the lottery.   Hashing a billion hashes which don't solve the block doesn't make you closer to solving a block.

once online connection connects again?