can someone explain pool difficulty to me?


I have 12963MH/s from my one worker, and I set 9-16gh/s from the pool's dropdown menu and it says difficulty 8

my stratum proxy says also says

"proxy getwork_listener._on_submit # [0ms] Share from 'worker1' accepted, diff 8"



can someone explain what the benefit of this is? vs a difficulty of 1?

how does this effect my payout, how does it help the pool, pros cons etc