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I'm trying to do CPU mining as part of a pool that I found here -- https://xmrpool.net/#/help/getting_started . As I have crappy hardware, I thought I'd try the easiest setting. The site says difficulty 1000 if you connect to port 3333 of one of their servers. So this is what I did, and then I started getting jobs. However, I noticed the target for those jobs seems greater than 1000, for example 

{"jsonrpc":"2.0","method":"job","params":{"blob":"0707d7dadfd80571a39f4758e3a55abed794760f384b28f2fbbdee383e7f094e098b3d4af1031d000000004ae66605e2ebfed531099edc0ce85d6322218fcd7f540d39f58ff3bb37306bbc02","job_id":"oWTFOgHaBkkbFDaJ6mVfQ2cdRi9A","target":"37894100","id":"fb89882e-5b3f-4bf9-a4bc-d07aaf4e8655"}}

Even though this "target" value is in hex, when unraveled, the value is greater than 1000 (the above is decimal value 4294967 if I'm reading it correctly). What am I missing here? Or is the pool sending things of much harder difficulty than what is advertised?

Dave
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1 Answers1

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The port used defines the starting difficulty.

From the pool doc you referenced:

The Port is used in conjunciton with the url and is used to specify the starting difficulty.

As soon as you submit a result, the pool updates your difficulty for the next job it sends you based on how long it took you to hash the last (or to be more accurate, it averages your previously submitted job/hash times and adjusts based on block time). This is to ensure the server sends you jobs with a difficulty that can be expected to be hashed within the block time window and not overload the server sending lots of small difficulty jobs to miners that can be expected to hash higher difficulty per job.

Most pools allow you to specify a fixed difficulty. With your pool, if you wanted a fixed difficulty of 3500, this is done by appending +3500 to your wallet address (username). Example (again from the doc you referenced):

Username : 43To46Y9AxNFkY5rsMQaLwbRNaxLZVvc4LJZt7Cx9Dt23frL6aut2uC3PsMiwGY5C5fKLSn6sWyoxRQTK1dhdBpKAX8bsUW+3500
jtgrassie
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