12:20:41 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 12:20:51 What does this mean? 12:23:22 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. 12:23:57 The pool will take care to submit to the chain only those solutions which match the chain difficulty. 12:24:03 oh so after I submit a share I should see the real one? 12:24:14 I do not understand that question. 12:24:53 ah maybe I'm misunderstanding the pool's logic 12:25:09 I thought I would be mining at the actual network difficulty 12:25:32 The difficulty threshold is a filter. Your miner generates a lot of nonces. Each of these "gets hashed" to a hash. 12:25:52 In solo mining, the filter is "hash matches network difficulty". 12:26:23 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. 12:26:37 Right so for solo mining I'd get the target from 0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff/$difficulty 12:26:46 And in the pool it's different 12:27:02 So you'll be finding a lot more "blocks", most of which just won't be valid, but the pool will use those to decide how much of the block rewards you'll get. 12:27:18 aha understood 12:27:19 No, same thing. Just with a different difficulty. 12:28:22 okay. For solomining though, I'd have to do 0xffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff/$difficulty , correct? 12:28:40 Sounds plausible. 12:28:45 Since that's the only way to produce the valid PoW 12:28:57 Thanks 13:03:46 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 13:04:42 otherwise you can double dip and get pool rewards + any blocks you personally find 13:07:57 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. 13:09:52 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. 13:18:46 To claim block's reward, miner needs to change the block template, and it will invalidate the hash 13:19:12 Pool miners don't even have access to the full block template 13:20:08 They can generate their own, but poll will reject it because it's not what it sent to them 13:57:31 oh yeah duh because the payout address is in the block 13:58:19 thx for answering the dumb question heh