Hi everyone,

Can someone enlighten me on the meaning of the stratum difficulty set by a mining pool, e.g. 32, and the network difficulty (reported as 0.02... the network has  500kh/s thereabouts, not sure if that's accurate though), and the difficulty my miner is reporting and when shares are accepted?  These are below 0.02, usually around 0.005 and less).

I can't find anywhere that explains what these difficulty numbers are and how to think about them in terms of the target hash, if that's what you do with difficulty.

I have read the stratum diff simply filters out work submitted which doesn't meet requirements, but I am not sure why the stratum diff would be set at a certain number, and how this relates to the network difficulty.  If the network diff is reasonably low and it's possible to find blocks every few hours solo mining, how would a mining pool know to set a stratum diff that agrees with the network diff?  Why would they be different?

Thanks for any help.