Can shares be lost?

[jaredthesovereign]

Newb question:

I'm testing out a pool I created in a private network and I see the miners have valid shares without a block being solved.  The server had to go down for a few hours for maintenance.  Now that the server is back up, are all of those valid shares lost or will they carryover with the new validated shares and count towards solving a block?

Thanks in advance!

[kano]

Newb question:

I'm testing out a pool I created in a private network and I see the miners have valid shares without a block being solved.  The server had to go down for a few hours for maintenance.  Now that the server is back up, are all of those valid shares lost or will they carryover with the new validated shares and count towards solving a block?

Thanks in advance!

Depends on the software ... and if it stores the shares somehow in some reliable transactional database or some other unreliable way

Though, the shares themselves have no affect at all, on future block finding, just on your accounting to pay out the miners.

[jaredthesovereign]

Thanks kano!

I'm running UNOMP and it looks like all the shares are still there.  Do you know how many shares on average it will take the collective of miners to solve a block?  Is there a specific formula? I've read many different articles on it and it seems like there are slight variations in different folks' explanations.

A link to a correct source would be most helpful if you have one.

Thanks again!

[kano]

It's the "bitcoin difficulty"
Google

[jaredthesovereign]

Thanks.  I found the equation at the bottom of the wiki