There are answers to some of the most common and curious questions regarding cryptocurrency mining.
| № | Question | Answer |
| 1 | What is a share? | Share is a possible valid hash for a block that is being sent by your rig to the pool to prove its work. |
| 2 | What does Share difficulty mean? | Share difficulty is a static difficulty at which shares are being submitted in order to get submitted shares in reasonable time. |
| 3 | What is a block? | Block is a file where data and transactions pertaining to a network reordered. |
| 4 | What is PPLNS payout method? | PPLNS is short for “Pay Per Last N Shares”. This is round based reward method. One round is the time between the first share after the last found block and the share which solves a block. This is one of the most fairest reward systems - whenever Nanopool finds a block, miners get rewarded based on the number of submitted shares in PPLNS timeframe. |
| 5 | How long does it take to solve/find a block? | It depends on a coin and on a number of active miner in the pool: The more miners are in - the more frequently blocks are found. |
| 6 | What does hash-rate/hashing mean? | This stands for the mining power that your GPUs are generating. MH/s stands for megahash per second and GH/s stands for gigahash per second. |
| 7 | What does Sol/s mean? | It stands for the mining power that your GPUs are generating. Sol/s stands for Solutions per second. (Equihash algorithm) |
| 8 | What is a pool luck? | Coin mining is extremely luck based and probabilistic in its nature: Whenever pool solves a block earlier than statistically it is expected on average - pool is lucky. However, if it takes longer than expected - pool is unlucky. |
| 9 | If a network difficulty increases will my profit drop? | Yes, the more miners are mining a certain coin, the higher network difficulty is, the less your mining reward will be. |
| 10 | What is an uncle In Ethereum network? | Ethereum uncle is a stale block which is found late. Valid uncles are rewarded in order to neutralise the effect of network lag on the dispersion of mining rewards, thus increasing security of the network. |
| 11 | What are orphans? | Orphans are stale blocks that are found late. |
| 12 | What is a Worker? | Worker represents your mining equipment on the pool. |
| 13 | What is calculated hash-rate? | Calculated hash-rate is hash-rate that is based on a number of submitted shares in last 10 minutes. |
| 14 | What is last reported hash-rate? | Last Reported hash-rate is what your miner telling the pool your hash-rate is. |
| 15 | What is a hash/hash function/hashing? | Hash is a alphanumeric string. Basically a hash function takes an input data of any length and returned an output of specific length. The process of applying a hash function is called hashing. |
| 16 | What is a RIG? | Rigs are particularly assembled GPUs into one machine to mine coins. |
| 17 | What is a node? | Nodes are the individual parts of the larger data structure that is the blockchain. The role of a node is to support the network by maintaining a copy of the blockchain. |
| 18 | What is Blockchain? | Blockchain is a public ledger of all transactions set into Blocks, which continues to grow exponentially. Blockchain allows parties to transact securely in the absence of a third party intermediary. |
| 19 | What is Proof-of-Work? | Proof-of-Work, or PoW, is a consensus algorithm in a Blockchain network. This algorithm is used to confirm transactions avoid double-spending as well as produce new blocks to the blockchain. |
| 20 | What is Gas? | Gas is the internal pricing for sending transactions in Ethereum network. |
| 21 | What is Next DAG Epoch countdown? | Ethereum uses a DAG (directed acyclic graph) to provide the proof of work algorithm. A DAG file is sorted in a GPU memory and each new epoch it requires more GPU memory, therefore it is important to keep track of it to make sure your GPU memory is enough to fit next DAG file. |
| 22 | What is a stale/rejected share? | Shares get rejected by the pool in case the hardware it was sent from functioning incorrectly (can be caused by overlocking). Whereas stale shares are when it takes longer than expected for your hardware to sent them out (usually internet issues). |