Hi miners,
I am using Hiveon Pool for quite some times and I was wondering if I can see the difficulty level used from Hiveon Pool to understand how the shares are distributed.
Just to put things in context;
You all know that we (miners) are getting paid by the number of shares we got approved on Hiveon pool (or another mining pool). The shares from hiveon pool are calculated if we find a nonce that meets the target hash or the mining pool difficulty level but it's not necessary a good nonce to add a block in the Ethereum blockchain because the Ethereum network difficulty level is always higher compared to the pool difficulty.
In fact, the shares allow the mining pool to calculate and distribute the ETH minted and the miner tips and make sure that the miners are really participating by adding computational powers to try to solve the mathematical problem.
When I write "target hash" or "mining pool difficulty", in fact it literally means a whole number that you obtain when you copy-paste the "target hash" expressed in a hexadecimal number in your JavaScript Console on Chrome, for instance:
https://imgur.com/U0eLK4K So, in my example (see link above) I took a random "target hash" and it gives this number on base 10:
4.964248710538878e+47
The "e" it's for "10 exponent something" so it's 4.964248710538878 multiply by 10 exponent 47 or if you prefer 4.964248710538878 X 10 ^ 47 which is a super huge number.
So if your mining rig
find a number smaller than this 4.964248710538878e+47 so the mining pool will give you a share.
Again this number doesn't mean necessarily that it's a good solution to add a block on the Ethereum blockchain because the mining pool use a smaller difficulty level or target hash compared to the difficulty level of the Ethereum network. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, this is the beauty of the mining pool's fundamental mechanism.
So to simplify, the mining rig try different nonce like a brute-force attack (if you got 300 Mh/s then your mining rig try 300 millions nonce per second in average) and every time it tries a new nonce with the same data entry (the transactions on the block) then it will give you a different hexadecimal number or hash and if the hash or number is smaller than the hash target or number target then you got a share from the mining pool.
I don't think I explain it correctly enough, if you really want to understand the mechanics behind your mining payments I suggest you watch this outstanding video from Anders Brownworth. It is so much easier to understand with a video like that:
https://andersbrownworth.com/blockchain/Then I asked Hiveon Pool more details about how they calculate their "target hash" or "difficulty level" and the only thing they can tell me (because it's secret codes) is this:
We use vardiff on the pool . I.e. the difficulty is given to the rig depending on its speed of finding the shares. Here's a short post explaining Vardiff algorithm:
https://help.slushpool.com/en/support/solutions/articles/77000433929-what-is-vardiff-variable-difficulty-algorithm-Let me know guys if you understand better the process of receiving accepted shares from Hiveon pool (it's probably similar with the other mining pools) and receiving minted ETH. This was bugging me for weeks, I had to buy an Udemy course about building dapp on Ethereum to finally understand the basics of mining pool's share.
