Difficulty & Adjustments

Network Difficulty

Bitcoin's difficulty is a measure of how hard it is to find a valid block hash. The network automatically adjusts difficulty every 2,016 blocks (~2 weeks) to maintain an average block time of 10 minutes.

• If blocks are found too fast → difficulty increases
• If blocks are found too slow → difficulty decreases

Impact on Mining Shares

Higher difficulty means:

• Each share represents more work (more hashes needed to find a valid share)
• Individual shares are worth more in PPS terms
• But they are also harder to find, so total revenue depends on hashrate

Pool Difficulty vs Network Difficulty

m1n3 uses a separate pool difficulty that is much lower than the network difficulty. This allows miners to submit shares frequently (proving they are doing work) without needing to find an actual Bitcoin block.

• Pool min difficulty — the minimum share difficulty accepted by the pool
• Vardiff — the stratum server dynamically adjusts each miner's difficulty to target a consistent share submission rate

Difficulty Adjustments

The Stats page tracks:

• Next difficulty adjustment — estimated change percentage
• Remaining blocks — how many blocks until the next adjustment
• Epoch progress — percentage of the current 2,016-block epoch completed

A positive adjustment (difficulty increase) generally means more hashrate has joined the network, which reduces each miner's expected revenue. A negative adjustment means hashrate has left.

Luck Factor

The pool's luck factor compares actual blocks found to the expected number based on total shares and difficulty:

• > 1.0 — the pool is "lucky" (finding more blocks than expected)
• < 1.0 — the pool is "unlucky" (finding fewer blocks than expected)
• Over time, luck converges toward 1.0