Change in static coin mining
Posted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 7:19 pm
Today, we made a small change to static coin mining.
When we released the newest performance improvements to the share inserter, we removed the code that prevented static coin miners from mining coins less difficult than their share difficulty. We decided to retain that change, but we also modified payouts so that these miners will now be paid as if their shares are worth as much as the network's block difficulty.
The previous code was mathematically incorrect because miners could theoretically make more money than the network could create. The blocks simply weren't worth enough to pay them the large difficulties of the shares they could mine. In practice, however, miners who mined with static difficulties on static coins have large numbers of stale shares, because every valid share finds a block and then the subsequent blocks with the same height are rejected.
If you mine difficult static coins, or if you have a slow miner that mines easy coins, or if you use auto switching, or if you use automatic difficulty, then you won't be affected by this change.
The documentation on the website will be modified to reflect this change shortly.
When we released the newest performance improvements to the share inserter, we removed the code that prevented static coin miners from mining coins less difficult than their share difficulty. We decided to retain that change, but we also modified payouts so that these miners will now be paid as if their shares are worth as much as the network's block difficulty.
The previous code was mathematically incorrect because miners could theoretically make more money than the network could create. The blocks simply weren't worth enough to pay them the large difficulties of the shares they could mine. In practice, however, miners who mined with static difficulties on static coins have large numbers of stale shares, because every valid share finds a block and then the subsequent blocks with the same height are rejected.
If you mine difficult static coins, or if you have a slow miner that mines easy coins, or if you use auto switching, or if you use automatic difficulty, then you won't be affected by this change.
The documentation on the website will be modified to reflect this change shortly.