For reason/s unknown my trusty Gamma, modestly overclocked, set a new difficulty ath today. No idea why it suddenly did this (prev. high was 913m) , or what difference / benefit having a miner running at a higher difficulty would bring. Any ideas? Or if you know of a good online video / guide to mining bitcoin please post up a link.
The first hour I plugged my Gamma Pro it hashed out a best diff of 28.09G. Itâs never been close again. Best diff is still above my pay grade so if you find info on it Iâd be tickled to see what you discover
Just for reference - Since then this is what I have for the Gamma Pro, NerdQAxe and a Gamma. (In order in pic below)
I donât think there is any benefit. All other things equal, the higher the number there, the more lucky you have been. But in the real world, past luck has no bearing on future luck.
My LLM said:
Mining difficulty refers to how hard it is to find a new block in the Bitcoin blockchain. It adjusts approximately every two weeks based on the total computing power of the network. Higher difficulty means more computational power is needed to solve the cryptographic puzzles required for mining.
For Bitaxe miners, the âbest difficultyâ is the optimal level that balances the chances of successfully mining a block with the resources used. Here are key points to consider:
When using Bitaxe miners, consider the following:
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Minimum Difficulty | Set to 10,000 for better detection by pools. |
| Client-Diff Option | Allows setting a lower difficulty for feedback. |
| Hashrate Impact | Low hashrate may not be detected by the pool. |
Choosing the right difficulty setting is crucial for optimizing your mining efficiency and profitability. Adjust settings based on your hardware capabilities and the current network conditions.
Also Plebsource: Why Do My Two Bitaxe Gammas Have Different Best Shares? Understanding â PS
I disagree with the LLM. Even if it refers to the current share difficulty (which doesnât fit the word âbestâ), it has virtually zero impact on profitability over time as long as you are finding shares. It only impacts how volatile/bursty the rewards are.
That is an AI for youâŚdumber than the human the scrapped the data in the first place. I do not take any LLMâs advice on anything actuallyâŚKinda like the advice the LLM gave to make pizza cheese thickerâŚadd Elmerâs glueâŚa scrap from Reddit post 
I learn a lot from LLMs, though (and I could be wrong in this case too), but the way I understand pool shares difficulty is these are algorithmically similar to the base layer difficulty adjustment, but used for a fundamentally different purpose. In the case of pool mining, the difficulty is a mechanism by which the pool can estimate your hash rate. This is necessary, because the pool cannot simply trust that you are actually doing the work, but it also cannot check every hash that your ASIC is generating.
They do this by using a twist on Proof Of Work. The pool has the ASIC hash away, and any time it finds a hash that is below a particular threshold (determined by the share difficulty), it sends that block template and hash to the pool, which confirms the block template and the hash match. The pool can then trust that a certain amount of work must have been done to produce that hash, and it uses that to estimate your ASICâs hash-rate, to calculate your fair share of the block rewards as the pool finds them, and so-on.
With this in mind, my hypothesis is that âBest Difficultyâ is probably not related to the pool shares difficulty algorithm (otherwise the word âbestâ is a bit confusing here). A term like that sounds to me like a sort of âhigh scoreâ tracking your luckiest block template hash found so far. I could certainly be wrong about that though, since I havenât looked it up. I suppose it could refer to the most difficult bucket that the pool has placed you in, but I donât think I would have used the word âbestâ for that (something like âhardestâ would make more sense if it were referring to that).
Some more AI output on the subject:
What âBest Difficultyâ Tells You
Benefits (Indirect but Useful)
Important CaveatItâs not the same as solving a block. Only the miner who finds a hash below the network target gets the block reward. So while a high best difficulty is cool, itâs more like getting close to the bullseye â not hitting it.
The more I run my other miners the highesr their âbestâ rating goes, which I think might mean more than a 1-off bitaxe high number, for one of the reasons above, that higher accepted shares count more (I read a similar thing from someone at Ocean). As to finding blocks it probably doesnât mean much, but for pool mining may be more useful.
Yeh, I really think it is just a personal âhigh scoreâ. It says nothing about what your ASIC might be doing at this particular moment, or what target difficulty the pool might have given you to mine at. It doesnât even refer to the pool at all. You could track your âbest difficultyâ even when solo mining, because it is referring to the actual difficulty of a real hash that you found, not to a difficulty target.