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I'm developing a miner to study how mining works and I've connected it to a pool using Stratum. When I use the bits provided by the pool to calculate the target, it is different from the miner that I use (cpuminer). The target from cpuminer is easier than mine, like, the cpuminer target has 4 leading zeroes and mine has like 13 leading zeroes. I also noticed that the pool sends the difficulty, but I have no idea how should I use it.

How should I use the difficulty provided by the pool to calculate my target?

Edit: I've set it up to get difficulty 8 only.

cpuminer target: 00002000 00000000 00000000 00000000 ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff ffffffff

my target      : 00000000 0071c175 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
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  • Is one using testnet and the other using mainnet?
    – RedGrittyBrick
    Commented Jun 19, 2021 at 20:48
  • Both are using the same stratum pool with the same difficulty (16). I also think cpuminer target is always the same for this difficulty, idk if there is another formula to calculate the target by difficulty number.
    – bot
    Commented Jun 20, 2021 at 15:10
  • Ops, difficulty 8*
    – bot
    Commented Jun 20, 2021 at 15:28
  • Are you talking about the block's "nbits" value, because that refers to the network-wide difficulty. Perhaps the other thing you see is the pool's share difficulty?
    – Pieter Wuille
    Commented Jun 20, 2021 at 16:00
  • When the pool sends a work, it contains the "nbits" value which, in theory, should be used in block header, so I used it. The work also contains the mining difficulty, which I set to "8", but I don't know how I should use it. I asked this question because I don't know why cpuminer target is easier than mine, so probably I did something wrong and I want to know what.
    – bot
    Commented Jun 20, 2021 at 19:35

1 Answer 1

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I searched for a few days and finally fixed my problem, thanks to https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/23112/123635, it solved many problems that the documentation didn't clear up (like block hashing).

Basically, just do (in my case, with scrypt coins):

target = 0x0000FFFF00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 / stratum difficulty

so:

target = 0x0000FFFF00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 / 8

target = "00001fffe0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000"
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1
  • if this answers your own question you should accept it
    – user112185
    Commented Jul 21, 2021 at 10:44

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