How to start mining?

To get started mining, check our getting started guide.

I am having problems connecting to the pool

Double check your settings against pool’s getting started guide.

The pool isn’t showing my correct hashrate!

The pool has no idea what hashrate your miner is reporting, and that number,as far as the pool is concerned, is fairly meaningless. The pool displaysyour hashrate from submitted, valid shares. There are also several otherreasons it could be showing up incorrectly. The most common reason is thatyou are trying to mine scrypt but forgot to include the –scrypt flag inyour cgminer command line.

The only hashrate that matters is your accepted hashrate from the shares yousubmit. If you’re connected and submitting shares, if you think yourhashrate seems low, and there do not seem to be any other obvious issueswith the pool/website, the problem is most likely your miner.

My worker is being banned by your stratum servers!

That will only happen when you have a misconfigured cgminer/bfgminer whereyour miner sends problematic shares. Double check your mining software'sconfiguration.

What is a Orphan block?

Coins generated by a block will not be available to you right away. Theywill take some time to be confirmed by the entire network before you areallowed to transfer them out of the pool. Usually coins have a confirmationset to 120. What that actually means: the network (not the pool) has todiscover 120 additional blocks on top of the one found by the pool toconfirm it.

What is a share?

Finding blocks is not an easy task. Since it would take a really long timeon some coins, finding a block is broken down into shares. Depending on theserver side setting, each share can be a certain difficulty. The moredifficult each share is to find by miners, the fewer total shares arerequired to eventually find a block.

On the server side, each share is checked against the coin daemon (a serverside wallet with more features) if it is indeed a valid block solution.Every share computed has the potential to be a block solution. I will notgo into details why this is, but rest assured that share estimates forblocks can sometimes be exceeded. In the long run though, shorter roundwith less shares than required will make up for those taking very long.

Keep in mind: shares are not blocks! Shares are part of a block and willcount towards the block payout!

At times, you will see shares being rejected by the pool. This can happen ifyou try to send an outdated share right after a block was found. Stratum, aprotocol used by a miner to request work from a server, is used for sharesubmission and getting new work. It is very solid when it comes to avoidingrejects but they can still happen once in a while.

If you are seeing reject all the time, then something isn’t working right onyour end. You may also notice that your hashrate on the pool website is notincreasing while your invalid share count keeps climbing up. In that caseturn off your miner and check your settings!

What is pool variance?

This is the variance caused by the pool being too small. Using a method withhigh pool-variance does no harm to large pools.

What exactly is VARDIFF?

Many users have inquired about what VARDIFF means. VARDIFF stands forVariable Difficulty. Simply put the pool monitors the power of your miningrig and adjusts the difficulty of work sent to it to optimize the workdone. This reduces the times your client needs to get new work from theserver reducing load and reducing the time it takes to get more work. Thisis also good for the pool as it reduces the amount of requests being doneto the pool, this allows the pool to scale.

My difficulty jumps around, is this normal?

Yes, it is completely normal. The mining server monitors the work you aresending to the pool and if it feels you are sending work too fast or tooslow it will “Retarget” your difficulty to best server your client at thattime. This process is continual.

My share count has gone way up or down! Will I getpaidless/more?

No! Every single share submitted is recorded on our system with thedifficulty of that share. That share is then weighted for the difficultydone. When a block is found and the system pays out for that block, yourshares are paid based on the difficulty of each one.

What is the recommended difficulty for my miner?

One thing to remember is that difficulty doesn't affect earnings. It onlyaffects variance and bandwidth usage. Higher difficulties will result inlower bandwidth but higher variance (opposite for lower difficulties).

What is estimated paypout?

It is your estimated payout if a block is found at that time. This is anestimate according to your amount of shares submitted for the round(s).

I’ve been mining for X hours, when will I get paid?

Our pools use a share system in which your account balance will update oncea new block is found after you started mining.

I’ve setup my payment address to a Cryptsy oranother exchangehosted wallet but my coins doesn’t arrive

First and foremost, you shouldn’t be using Crypsty or another exchange asyour payment address set into the pool. You are advised to install a localwindows-qt client on your computer and set your payment address to thatlocal wallet. You can then send your coins to exchanges using your localwallet.

That’s caused by a number of factors;

• First, most exchanges not allowing mined coins to directly send them.
• Second exchanges are mostly slow to process transactions. EspeciallyCryptsy is popular for slowly processing transactions and requiring youto create a ticket even for some coins
• If the exchange undergoes a maintenance period or stop accepting aspecific coin, your sent coins maybe lost. (Cryptsy is again known forshutting down exchanges for coins without proper prior notification).

So as explained above, it’s quite problematic to you exchanges as yourpayout address and even more after our pools commit a transaction,technically there is no way for us to revert a transaction.

Remember, that if you still insist on using exchanges as payout addresses,basically it’s your responsibility to track your coins as stated in ourTerms of Service.