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I have been trying to find out what the benefits are to starting out mining pools at higher difficulties. I imagine there must be some added benefit to it but I haven't found any real information on it. Can anyone shed some light on this or point me towards some documentation on it?

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A high pool difficulty is for high power mining equipment. What this does is lowers the bandwidth amount for both the pool and the miner. Because the difficulty is higher, the miner will find valid shares less frequently, resulting in less data transmitted from the miner to the pool.

Lower difficulties are for lower powered mining equipment, so that the miner has a chance to submit some valid shares before the next network block is found, and it has to start the hashing process over again for the new block. If no shares are submitted by a miner between blocks, that miner will get no credit for the mined block. This is why pools have several different difficulty levels.

Typically pool payouts are weighted on the number of shares per miner, while those shares are weighted on the difficulty setting, so a low difficulty share is worth less than a high difficulty share.

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  • I guess I am trying to find out exactly how they are weighed differently. Is there an equation that can be used to find out how much a certain share of a specific difficulty would be worth when mined in a pool with x amount a people mining at a certain hashrate?
    – opticz_akz643
    Oct 11, 2016 at 21:10
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    It depends on the pool, there are quite a few different algorithms that pools use to calculate payouts. Sorry, but I don't think there is a simple formula answer to that question.
    – Quentin Skousen
    Oct 11, 2016 at 21:12
  • I was thinking that it might depend also on the pool as well.
    – opticz_akz643
    Oct 11, 2016 at 21:14
  • @opticz_akz643 if this answers your question, feel free to mark it as accepted so it doesn't show up in the list of unanswered questions. Thanks!
    – Quentin Skousen
    Oct 11, 2016 at 21:44
  • 1 difficulty gives you 1 share. 32 difficulty gives you 32 shares. 2048 difficulty gives you 2048 shares. You'd want at least 1 accepted share per block otherwise you are missing out on payouts for blocks the pool solved. I get more accepted shares at 32 difficulty vs 2048 difficulty. 2048 difficulty means I miss out on payouts because I don't have any accepted shares for a block the pool solved.
    – Sun
    Oct 5, 2017 at 21:41

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