Greetings miners and *coin fans alike!
I'm fresh out of Binary School into the big wide world of mining and wow, there is a ton of information to digest. While I have managed to spin up my computer with software and start mining, I am left with puzzling questions.
Let's start with Shares.
From what I understand, shares is basically me participating in work I do on a block; the more work I do, the more shares I get? Yes?
My rig tops out at around 70kh/s on an NVIDIA card; I'm aware AMD hardware is superior however bear with me here:
2013-12-02 17:06:24: Listener for "MiddleCoin": [2013-12-02 17:06:24] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
2013-12-02 17:06:37: Listener for "MiddleCoin": [2013-12-02 17:06:37] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
2013-12-02 17:06:56: Listener for "MiddleCoin": [2013-12-02 17:06:55] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
2013-12-02 17:07:26: Listener for "MiddleCoin": [2013-12-02 17:07:25] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
2013-12-02 17:07:33: Listener for "MiddleCoin": [2013-12-02 17:07:33] Stratum from pool 0 detected new block
Would this imply that these five blocks have been solved within roughly 15-20 seconds of each other? Do I get any shares for working on these blocks? How is "1" share defined? Is there a certain minimum of hashes/second which must be performed on the current block to qualify for even one share? Are partial shares issued?
I chose middlecoin for the simplicity of the setup; I am sure we can go into conversations about pools and whatnot later.
In the meantime, I am using GUIMiner-scrypt alpha and one of its settings is something known as "worksize". What is this? The default appears to be "256". Is this measured in kilobytes? What does this mean to my rig and I? Is a higher or smaller number better? Is there a sweet spot? I've found adjusting this number up or down severely impacts my hash/second rate so I've left it at 256. I assume it has to be a multiple like 256, 512, 1024 and so on.
What are vectors? What are GPU threads? I understand these settings may be specific to GUIMiner explicitly; my apologies if I have the wrong area to be asking this in.
Finally, in the terminology document (great resource, by the way) there is one item which has really piqued my interest, specifically the item referring to a Change Address:
'Change' & 'Change Address'
When you send a transaction, the value, at the address you're sending from, must be spent in its entirety. If you only want to spend part of the funds at that address, then the client generates a 'Change Address', and sends the difference there. You should be especially careful when sending from a 'Paper Wallet', as there have been several situations where people using paper wallets have lost some of their BTC because they are not aware that, depending on the client they imported their key into, the remainder of their unspent BTC is not necessarily sent back to the original address on the paper wallet.
The wiki gives further examples, yet neither the terminology document or the wiki give examples of how to safeguard oneself against the mentioned potential loss. Thoughts, anyone?
Warm regards,
mikeyyc
