Bitcoin Forum

It would halve the pool network traffic and halve likelihood for comms crashes leading to lock-ups on miners side.

I can't see why the pools do not do this for bigger miners, it benefits the pools in bandwidth costs and other overheads also?

Could even have tiered accounts, difficulty 5, 10 for even bigger miners, it makes sense. What's the hang-up with difficulty 1 shares ... network difficulty is now at 434,000 and every time it goes up it means more difficulty 1 shares have gone onto the network.

Network Difficulty has absolutely no effect upon how many difficulty>1 shares are found.

Wouldn't a pool want all it's workings on the same difficulty? I cannot imagine the headache of trying to score a round when some workers are solving difficulty n while others are on difficulty 1.

Although, in spirite, if a pool did just say difficulty 2 (or whatever other number) was what they were going with it would decrease network IO... but, for slower miners it might create the (false) perception that that particular pool was less worthwhile than a pool using difficult of 1, based solely on the median time between shares.

I've been considering swapping BTC Guild to a higher difficulty of shares to reduce the work being sent to/from miners, as well as lowering the amount of requests going between pushpool, bitcoind, and MySQL.  My only concern at this point is for CPU miners, who are already submitting shares so rarely that a difficulty of 2 could mean they don't even complete a share before some rounds end.

If you're big enough, sure. I can make a per-user change.

One problem I see with this is that most of the miners that I've looked at their source code, are hardcoded to find shares at a difficulty of 1... regardless of what the pool specifies.

Network Hashing Power directly correlates to the number of difficulty>1 shares found. Network Difficulty does not. An increase in Network Difficulty does not necessarily mean that more difficulty>1 shares will be found as it is possible that the Network Hashing Power drops after the difficulty increase.

Really? I used to solo with poclbm which connects to a local bitcoind instance at whatever difficulty of the day and it works fine. If miners assumed difficulty==1, they would not be suitable for soloing.

At some point, this is going to become necessary.

We will have to invent meta-pools for CPU miners to join.  The meta-pool can accept difficulty 1 shares from miners, and the miners can earn meta-shares in the meta-pool.  Then the meta-pool submits any hashes that meet the next level of criteria to the real pool, which issues shares to the meta-pool.  When the real pool pays out, the meta-pool can pay down to the miners.

I know that Phoenix kernels assume difficulty==1, but the base program itself checks the real difficulty before sending it on.

I think that some people have modified their version of poclbm to assume difficulty==1, but I don't think that the base code does that.

Great. How big is "big enough" and where do I sign up?

Edit I'm using poclbm raw so no problem with changing any mining code.

This is an open source community and open source derives its quality from everybody coming together to correct eachothers' mistakes. In order for such a process to work smoothly, people must check their egos at the door. You need to remove your emotions from your submissions and allow them to grow into the best that they can be.

I agree with the intent of your idea, I merely submitted a correction to one inaccuracy in your OP.

A ghash or so. ONly because this would involve me writing some pushpool modifications. I don't think it'd be wise to implement pool wide just because users might confuse over half the shares but doing it on a per-worker basis wouldn't be hard.

So you do want to argue semantics ... whatta piece of work ... point to my "inaccuracy" or apologise for derailing my thread with erroneous, nit-picky fuckwitting around.

I think Meni Rosenfeld (Holy-fire) has some mathematics in the deepbit thread that proves missing out on short rounds in a pool does not change your variance ....

(I'm not sure how complete it was though)

What changes would need to be made to pushpool to implement a configurable difficulty response to the miners?

It would make more sense to fix the miners to accept whatever difficulty the pool requests rather than the other way around.

Poclbm miners will already just work on whatever diff. is sent to them.

I have been encouraging any pool operator that will listen to raise their difficulty.