Not Earning Shares

[jaysabi]

Just a quick question:

I have set up three CPU miners each with a separate worker account. I understand they are very, VERY slow compared to the total computing power of the pool, however each of my workers consistently produces 0 shares after a week of constantly running. This is not how I understood it should work. I thought that even though they are very slow, they would produce some shares, even if it is a very, very small portion of the total shares produced.

I know that finding a block is like winning the lottery on a CPU miner, but is the production of shares like a lottery as well, or should my workers be producing some small number of shares?

Please help.
Thank you.

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[ajax3592]

Hey there,
Welcome to the forum

More info could help, like what hardware are you using, what coin are you mining, how many hashes are you getting.

[pontiacg5]

You expected anything less? You've got just about the slowest bitcoin mining hardware on the planet, man. Based on no info provided, the pool doesn't want your shares, probably cut you out with a pool difficulty setting. Basically, you are solo mining (with CPUs, against GPUs) about two years back in BTC history. Except there's no block reward, just a PPS pool reward of a few hundredths of a cent.

Quit that, go mine CPU coins if anything and hope to get lucky on the market.  

[jaysabi]

I'm not very techy, so this is more of an exercise to see if I even set it up right. I'm getting about 4 Mh/s, which is ungodly slow I know, that's not the point. I'm just wondering if anything is configured wrong, as I consistently show 0 shares produced. Should I always be at 0 shares, or should I produce some shares which are just .000000000000001 of the total shares and therefore never worth anything.

[pontiacg5]

A share is a share, and a pool difficulty is the same as solo mining difficulty. If the pool imposes a "1" difficulty on you, then you are basically solo mining BTC at "1" difficulty without the chance of "winning" 25 BTC. Instead you are paid for one share, a much much lower rate. As old slow miners are phased out pools started imposing these difficulties to save on bandwidth. If you have double the hashrate you can double the difficulty and solve the same BTC value of shares in the same time, yet only have to send information to the pool once instead of twice. If you don't double the hashrate with the difficulty you loose half the shares in the same time, yet you are paid double.

My math is probably not entirely right on that last part. Not sure if it's a 50/50 correlation or not. The basics are there though.

If your difficulty is way too high for your hashrate you won't ever see any shares at all. There is no such thing as a half share, or a quarter share, or summing of partial shares. A share is a solution that meets or exceeds the difficulty. If you don't "guess" with your first hash you start all over, again and again. Statistically, it is possible to guess how long it will take to find a share at your current pool imposed difficulty based on how many "guesses" you get a second, or 4mh in this case. I would throw out a SWAG that the statistical rate is somewhere around 50% chance to solve one share in two weeks.

Can you post a screenshot of the mining program you are using, while it is running?

[jaysabi]

Thanks for the explanation, that's the first time the whole share thing made sense. So if I'm understanding it correctly, the reason shares are never generated is because the difficulty is too high for my computing power? Is it that blocks are solved before my computer ever stumbles across an answer? I guess that makes share generation unlikely, but not impossible?

I will post a screen shot of the mining program tomorrow (not at the computer running the program currently) but I can tell you it's the Kiv GUI miner and I selected it to run on both cores and it generates usually about 2-2.6 Mh/s.

I'm brand new to bitcoin, so I'm trying to learn how it works. Granted, several years late to the game, I'm just not sure if trying to GPU mine will be worth it. So I figured I'd try to set up the CPU miner to see if I could even do that. I wasn't sure if I did it wrong or if it's so antiquated as to be obsolete.

[pontiacg5]

GPU mining bitcoin is also dead, deader than anything I can think of. You really don't want to plan on GPU mining BTC. LTC, on the other hand...

You've still got the same chance of solving a share no matter when a block was solved. A pool difficulty generally stays the same, even after BTC difficulty adjustments. One second you might be working to solve one block, and the next you might be working another, but your odds of finding a share are still equal. Shares are pretty stupid, basically just changing random data, rehashing and hoping for a low share over and over again. There's no "working at a share" or "share is almost complete." At the most, someone else solving a block might make you toss one share as "stale" (for a block that doesn't exist) but you actually have to have shares to have stale shares.

I'm looking for the pool difficulty setting of your miner. I'm not familiar with anything but cgminer, so a screenshot of that GUI program might not even show what I'm after. Do you see "worker max difficulty" or anything at all about pool difficulty on your pool's website?




 

[jaysabi]

No, I don't see anything like that. I'm using Sluhs's pool. I'll post a screen shot tomorrow when I'm back at the computer. Hopefully it will provide you some more information.

[jaysabi]

Here's the screen shot of the program running if it helps you at all: