Difficulty defaults changed

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Wed Jul 01, 2020 10:23 am

Chris made some optimizations for the latest miners last night by changing the starting variable difficulty, and the allowed static difficulty ranges. The changes ranged from doubling the SHA-256 difficulty to increasing the maximum Lyra2REv2 difficulty by 1024 times.

We found that some miners, instead of waiting until the difficulty adjusts, simply fail to connect if the initial difficulty is too low. These changes will resolve those initial connectivity issues, and will also reduce bandwidth usage by bringing the initial share target time for the fastest miner in the world for each algorithm to 7.5s. The mining servers will then adjust, regardless of what miner you are using, to target one share every 30s.

Profitability is not affected by these changes. Even though most customers will find that their miners are submitting fewer shares, each share will pay more money.