How to start mining?
To get started mining, check our getting started guide.
I am having problems connecting to the pool
Double check your settings against pool’s getting started guide.
The pool isn’t showing my correct hashrate!
The pool has no idea what hashrate your miner is reporting, and that number, as far as the pool is concerned, is fairly meaningless. The pool displays your hashrate from submitted, valid shares. There are also several other reasons it could be showing up incorrectly. The most common reason is that you are trying to mine scrypt but forgot to include the –scrypt flag in your cgminer command line.
The only hashrate that matters is your accepted hashrate from the shares you submit. If you’re connected and submitting shares, if you think your hashrate seems low, and there do not seem to be any other obvious issues with the pool/website, the problem is most likely your miner.
My worker is being banned by your stratum servers!
That will only happen when you have a misconfigured cgminer/bfgminer where your miner sends problematic shares. Double check your mining software's configuration.
What is a Orphan block?
Coins generated by a block will not be available to you right away. They will take some time to be confirmed by the entire network before you are allowed to transfer them out of the pool. Usually coins have a confirmation set to 120. What that actually means: the network (not the pool) has to discover 120 additional blocks on top of the one found by the pool to confirm it.
What is a share?
Finding blocks is not an easy task. Since it would take a really long time on some coins, finding a block is broken down into shares. Depending on the server side setting, each share can be a certain difficulty. The more difficult each share is to find by miners, the fewer total shares are required to eventually find a block.
On the server side, each share is checked against the coin daemon (a server side wallet with more features) if it is indeed a valid block solution. Every share computed has the potential to be a block solution. I will not go into details why this is, but rest assured that share estimates for blocks can sometimes be exceeded. In the long run though, shorter round with less shares than required will make up for those taking very long.
Keep in mind: shares are not blocks! Shares are part of a block and will count towards the block payout!
At times, you will see shares being rejected by the pool. This can happen if you try to send an outdated share right after a block was found. Stratum, a protocol used by a miner to request work from a server, is used for share submission and getting new work. It is very solid when it comes to avoiding rejects but they can still happen once in a while.
If you are seeing reject all the time, then something isn’t working right on your end. You may also notice that your hashrate on the pool website is not increasing while your invalid share count keeps climbing up. In that case turn off your miner and check your settings!
What is pool variance?
This is the variance caused by the pool being too small. Using a method with high pool-variance does no harm to large pools.
What exactly is VARDIFF?
Many users have inquired about what VARDIFF means. VARDIFF stands for Variable Difficulty. Simply put the pool monitors the power of your mining rig and adjusts the difficulty of work sent to it to optimize the work done. This reduces the times your client needs to get new work from the server reducing load and reducing the time it takes to get more work. This is also good for the pool as it reduces the amount of requests being done to the pool, this allows the pool to scale.
My difficulty jumps around, is this normal?
Yes, it is completely normal. The mining server monitors the work you are sending to the pool and if it feels you are sending work too fast or too slow it will “Retarget” your difficulty to best server your client at that time. This process is continual.
My share count has gone way up or down! Will I get paid less/more?
No! Every single share submitted is recorded on our system with the difficulty of that share. That share is then weighted for the difficulty done. When a block is found and the system pays out for that block, your shares are paid based on the difficulty of each one.
What is the recommended difficulty for my miner?
One thing to remember is that difficulty doesn't affect earnings. It only affects variance and bandwidth usage. Higher difficulties will result in lower bandwidth but higher variance (opposite for lower difficulties).
The General Recommendation is:
- CPU Mining: Low Difficulty Ports
- GPU Mining: Medium Difficulty Ports
- ASIC/FPGA Mining: High Difficulty Ports
- Rentals e.g. MiningRigRentals/NiceHash: High Difficulty Ports
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