Post
Topic
Board Mining software (miners)
Re: BFGMiner 3.8.1: modular ASIC+FPGA, GBT+Strtm, RPC, Mac/Lnx/W64, HBRMicro+Avalon2
by
rahlquist
on 10/12/2013, 14:44:13 UTC
BFGMiner is showing the correct difficulty numbers. They are just so small they get rounded to 0. "Diff 32" is actually Diff 0.00048828125. cgminer is using the same conversion scheme that pools use, where all difficulties are multiplied by 65536. Except that even cgminer has now dropped that conversion in the block difficulty number. If only that conversion scheme had never been implemented, all this confusion could've been avoided.

I guess the conversion scheme was done because decimal numbers are thought of as inconvenient. Because scrypt mining is about a thousand times slower than sha256 on GPUs, it would take a thousand times longer to mine Diff 1 shares. Thus no pool would ever set a real target of even 1 for a worker. Then someone came up with the genius idea of multiplying everything by 65536 so it looks neater. Sheesh.
Thank you for explaining this. Makes a lot of sense.