Hey I'm having some trouble understanding xmrig's difficulty logic. Currently on Monero mainnet the difficulty is 284746624460, but when I connect xmrig to a pool in connection info xmrig tells me the difficulty is 60000

What does this mean?

A pool needs to estimate your hash rate without you being able to hookwink it. So it makes you solve PoW at a lower difficulty.

The pool will take care to submit to the chain only those solutions which match the chain difficulty.

oh so after I submit a share I should see the real one?

I do not understand that question.

ah maybe I'm misunderstanding the pool's logic

I thought I would be mining at the actual network difficulty

The difficulty threshold is a filter. Your miner generates a lot of nonces. Each of these "gets hashed" to a hash.

In solo mining, the filter is "hash matches network difficulty".

In pool mining, the filter is "hash matches pool difficulty". The pool diff is low, so it's a coarse filter. The pool then filters more finely by itself.

Right so for solo mining I'd get the target from 0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff/$difficulty

And in the pool it's different

So you'll be finding a lot more "blocks", most of which just won't be valid, but the pool will use those to decide how much of the block rewards you'll get.

aha understood

No, same thing. Just with a different difficulty.

okay. For solomining though, I'd have to do 0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff/$difficulty , correct?

Sounds plausible.

Since that's the only way to produce the valid PoW

Thanks

since we're talking about it I always wondered what stops miners in a pool from broadcasting a block they find while connected to the pool and claim the whole reward. would need some modified software of course... but surely there must be protection against this

otherwise you can double dip and get pool rewards + any blocks you personally find

Nothing. If they mine on a block where the reward goes to them, that's fine. Of course, the pool will not accept a share for a block where the reward does not go to the pool. You get to choose, but you can do both at the same time.

Well, you cannot do both at the same time on the same block. You can of course mine on two blocks at the same time.

To claim block's reward, miner needs to change the block template, and it will invalidate the hash

Pool miners don't even have access to the full block template

They can generate their own, but poll will reject it because it's not what it sent to them

oh yeah duh because the payout address is in the block

thx for answering the dumb question heh