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What does the mining-pool architecture look like? Obviously GPU's can hash data much faster than it can be distributed via the internet, so I assume pools must allocate a range of nonces for miners to work on at any given time?

So if there were 2 miners, would the pool server allocate nonces 1-100,000 to miner 1, 100,101-200,000 to miner 2, then keep allocating the work as each set of nonces are completed? Or do I have it wrong?

I tried digging into the source of Eloipool, but it all seems very cryptic/there is very little (if any?) documentation?

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Traditionally, pools gave miners work units covering the entire nonce range 0-4,294,967,295. When the miner finishes work, he requests a new work unit with a different extraNonce (or payout address). Different miners also get work units with different details.

To reduce load, pools are now moving on to a setting where the miner can himself change details of the generation transaction and compute the Merkle root, so he can do as much work as he pleases without needing new assignment from the pool.

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  • What is the 'extraNonce' field? I saw this question (bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5048/what-is-the-extranonce) but it wasn't all that clear. I can't find anything about elsewhere.
    – Anonymous
    Aug 27, 2013 at 13:38
  • Ah, this article explains better: en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transactions - Thanks anyway.
    – Anonymous
    Aug 27, 2013 at 13:39
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    @a432511: A block header consists of 640 bits. A (traditional) work unit consists of 608 of these fixed by the pool and the other 32 bits chosen by the miner. This gives the miner 4 billion different hashes to try. Each has a chance to be a valid block depending on the difficulty. If doesn't find a block he requests another work unit (with different 608 bits), and so on. Of course if there are more miners the difficulty will be higher.
    – Meni Rosenfeld
    Apr 19, 2014 at 17:17
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    @a432511: The pool gives the miner a work unit which is a string of 608 bits. These are all the fields described in en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Protocol_specification#Block_Headers except for the nonce - version, prev block hash, Merkle root, Timestamp, bits (difficulty). The 32-bit nonce field is filled in by the miner. He tries each one of the 4 billion possibilities (2^32) hoping to find a combination that hashes to a value that satisfies the difficulty requirement. Most of the time none of the combinations will do so, so he will request a new work unit and continue trying.
    – Meni Rosenfeld
    May 12, 2014 at 15:06
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    @a432511: The Merkle root field is the representation of all the transactions in the block. However the pool will not make drastic changes to the transaction list whenever it assigns a new work unit (whether to the same miner or a different one). It will modify slightly the generation transaction, resulting in a new Merkle root. The rest of the fields can stay the same, but the change in Merkle root guarantees a fresh new chance.
    – Meni Rosenfeld
    May 12, 2014 at 15:08

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