<p>Increasing your submission difficulty will reduce the number of shares you submit, in turn reducing your bandwidth costs and your pool's bandwidth requirements.</p>

<p>The downside for you as a miner is that increasing your share submission difficulty increases your variance in earnings. If you mine at a pool with user determined share submission difficulty (such as HHTT and Itzod) then it's up to you to decide how much variance you can bear. <a href="http://organofcorti.blogspot.com/2012/10/71-variable-pool-difficulty.html" rel="noreferrer">I've covered in detail the amount by which your earnings variance increases with increasing share difficulty elsewhere,</a> and you may want to look there for specific details.</p>

<p>Otherwise, at pools which automatically change submission difficulty to keep you submitting at a constant number of shares per minute, the variance should not be noticeable over an hour, and definitely not noticeable over a day.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-03-04T02:37:30.490Z
2013-03-04T02:37:30.490Z
organofcorti
<p>Share difficulty is important to prove your computer is doing the work of mining.  </p>

<p>You would set a higher difficulty on powerful hardware (ASICs) so that they don't need to request a new share (GetBlockTemplate, GetWork, Stratum, etc) each time.</p>

<p>The result is that your hardware is more active in the mining process, and less active waiting on the network or pool to give you work to do.</p>

<p>On the other hand, you don't want to wait too long for new work (too high difficulty) because that means you will miss out on new transactions (that pay fees), or worst case you will miss out on the block entirely and the work is wasted.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-03-04T00:10:49.577Z
Thank you very much, Sounds like I should just leave it on 1 for the time being then since I am only hashing at like 650 mhash/s per GPU.
compalalaska
CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-03-03T22:27:59.700Z
2013-03-03T22:27:59.700Z
makerofthings7
<p>I am running two 7970's and am adding a 3rd here in a few days (Mainly a Gaming Rig)but mining when I am not gaming.  I was wondering though does the minimum share difficulty that BTCguild sends to my miners make a difference?  Currently it is just the default of 1 but can go all the way up to 256 share difficulty. What is going to yield the best results for my hardware?</p>

<p>I am still quite new so any other advise is appreciated!</p>

<mining-pools>
Does the Share Difficulty given to each miner matter?
compalalaska
# Does the Share Difficulty given to each miner matter?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-03-03)

I am running two 7970's and am adding a 3rd here in a few days (Mainly a Gaming Rig)but mining when I am not gaming. I was wondering though does the minimum share difficulty that BTCguild sends to my miners make a difference? Currently it is just the default of 1 but can go all the way up to 256 share difficulty. What is going to yield the best results for my hardware?

I am still quite new so any other advise is appreciated!

**Tags:** mining-pools


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## 2 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2013-03-04. Score: 5

Increasing your submission difficulty will reduce the number of shares you submit, in turn reducing your bandwidth costs and your pool's bandwidth requirements.

The downside for you as a miner is that increasing your share submission difficulty increases your variance in earnings. If you mine at a pool with user determined share submission difficulty (such as HHTT and Itzod) then it's up to you to decide how much variance you can bear. [I've covered in detail the amount by which your earnings variance increases with increasing share difficulty elsewhere,](http://username_1.blogspot.com/2012/10/71-variable-pool-difficulty.html) and you may want to look there for specific details.

Otherwise, at pools which automatically change submission difficulty to keep you submitting at a constant number of shares per minute, the variance should not be noticeable over an hour, and definitely not noticeable over a day.


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### Answer by username_2 on 2013-03-03. Score: 2

Share difficulty is important to prove your computer is doing the work of mining.

You would set a higher difficulty on powerful hardware (ASICs) so that they don't need to request a new share (GetBlockTemplate, GetWork, Stratum, etc) each time.

The result is that your hardware is more active in the mining process, and less active waiting on the network or pool to give you work to do.

On the other hand, you don't want to wait too long for new work (too high difficulty) because that means you will miss out on new transactions (that pay fees), or worst case you will miss out on the block entirely and the work is wasted.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Thank you very much, Sounds like I should just leave it on 1 for the time being then since I am only hashing at like 650 mhash/s per GPU.  

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