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Bitcoin => Mining support => Topic started by: sid8ball on September 27, 2014, 03:56:59 PM



Title: what is the screen telling me
Post by: sid8ball on September 27, 2014, 03:56:59 PM

This is the screen shot of my current cgminer which is solo mining. I was originally in a pool which made sense. going alone not so much.
Can Someone explain the best share and difficulty on the screen and the block accepted.

http://i61.photobucket.com/albums/h71/sid8ball/mining.png


Title: Re: what is the screen telling me
Post by: Wusolini on September 27, 2014, 04:45:06 PM
best share:

Mining works by hashing a bunch of transaction information over and over (millions of hashes per second), slightly changing a few pre-determined variables each time to get a brand new hash, and then comparing all of the resulting hashes to see if one of them fits a certain set of criteria, called the difficulty. When a hash succeeds in this, the resulting hash will have a difficulty of 1 (or higher), and is now considered a "share", as we can submit this share to a pool.

Shares can vary in their difficulty. It's sort of like drawing straws (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_straws) with a bunch of different length straws: you never know how short the straw you're going to draw next is. The shorter the straw, the higher the difficulty, in our analogy. A share can have a difficulty of 1, 2 (twice has hard to find), 10 (10x harder), or 8,385,298 (8,385,298x harder to find). I don't know of any limit to how high the difficulty can go, but it gets incredibly harder to find higher difficulty shares.

A block is found when a share's difficulty is higher than the network difficulty. At the time of this writing, that's about 19.3million. All of those diff=1 shares you submit to your pool don't actually count for anything, except to prove to the pool that you're actually working on finding a block (share with diff>19.3M) for the pool.

Your "Best Share" is just a number to see how close you've come to finding a block. It's all completely random, so you could come back and find your GPU solved a block, or you could come back in a month and see you've never found anything higher. It's more of a fun, interesting number that doesn't really mean anything.

My 7970 in my desktop has a best share of 19.5K. If that were back in Jan of 2011 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc#gid=0), that would have been higher than the Network Difficulty, and it would have been a block solver. Now, it's nowhere close.


Hope this helped answer your question.


Difficulty: - https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty


or try some search in  OFFICIAL CGMINER mining software thread... (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28402.0)




Title: Re: what is the screen telling me
Post by: SirLolicon on September 27, 2014, 05:13:17 PM
I'm not so good at this mining business either, but from getting shares when solo mining, does that get you any amount at all?


Title: Re: what is the screen telling me
Post by: btcstomper on September 27, 2014, 05:47:54 PM
hi guys, im trying to mine but all of my hashes aren't getting accepted, what can be the problem? I have an ATi 280x


Title: Re: what is the screen telling me
Post by: -ck on September 27, 2014, 10:20:13 PM
I'm not so good at this mining business either, but from getting shares when solo mining, does that get you any amount at all?
Zero rewards in solo mining unless you find a block. They're purely an estimate of how hard you're trying.