Share

A share is a small, verifiable piece of mining work your rig submits to the pool. It is a result that meets an easier target than a real block. Shares measure each miner's contribution, and your reward is calculated from them.

Finding a real block is rare. If the pool only counted blocks, it could not tell who did the work. So it sets a share difficulty far below the network difficulty. Your miner finds results that meet it often, and each one is proof that you did a known amount of hashing.

A worked example. Say the network difficulty is 1,000,000,000 and your share difficulty is 100,000. A block then needs about 10,000 times the work of one of your shares. So on average, about one share in 10,000 also meets the network target, and that share is a block for the pool.

Shares are weighted by their difficulty. One share at difficulty 200,000 counts the same as two at 100,000. So a rig that sends fewer, harder shares is not paid less. Many miners worry about their share count, but the count alone says nothing about earnings.

Your miner reports each share as accepted or rejected. An accepted share counts. A stale share was valid work for a job that had already changed. An invalid share was simply wrong, often because of an unstable overclock. Only accepted shares earn.

A pool checks every share before it counts it, so you are credited only for genuine work. That also means a share the pool cannot check, or one that arrives late, does not count, however hard the rig worked.

To check your shares, look at the accepted and rejected totals in your miner and on the pool's miner page. A rejected rate of a percent or two is common. A rate that keeps rising is a sign to lower your overclock or check your connection.