Why we show stale shares
What a stale share costs you, why some pools hide it, how this pool reports it openly, and what your stale percentage says about your setup.
Why we show stale shares
A stale share is valid work that arrived after the network had already moved on. It earns nothing on any pool, because it can no longer help find a block.
So the only questions are whether a pool tells you, and what percentage you run at. Hiding staleness does not stop the cost. It only makes the cost invisible.
Why some pools hide them
Some pools silently accept stale shares. Others fold them into a padded "effective hashrate". Either way, you see a prettier number than an honest pool shows, while being paid from the same real work.
In a side-by-side trial, the honest pool looks worse on the dashboard. Yet it pays the same or better in the wallet.
So compare pools by their wallets over weeks, not by their dashboards over hours.
How this pool reports staleness
- Your dashboard reports your shares as the pool judged them.
- The Live tab streams each event as it happens.
- Your stale percentage comes from your full history, not a snapshot.
What your stale percentage tells you
Under roughly 1% stale is healthy.
A slow, creeping rise points at your connection or your region choice. To fix it:
- Re-run the latency test.
- Prefer a wired connection over Wi-Fi.
- Check the live stream for a flapping worker, one that keeps dropping and reconnecting.
A sudden jump across all rigs at once means network trouble between you and the region. Re-test it before you change anything on the rigs.