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[roy7]

Really nice options to control user pseudo share difficulties.

[roy7]

The only issue I think is default minimum difficulty should be 1/DUMB_SCRYPT_DIFF not simply 1, so it handles scrypt correctly also.

[bardiharborow]

How far off is this from being merged?

[CodeChief]

Can't you just edit the target_to_difficulty and difficulty_to_target functions rather than creating additional ..._alt variants? Because you're hiding the original implementation anyway in some places, e.g. web interface.

It must be possible to find one calculation which "just works out the box" (i.e. by default, should be no need for overrides/arguments unless you want to do advanced tuning). If the need for variance in calculation logic is inherent from the coin specification, then that should be sourced from a new metric and/or control flag property added to each coin specified in networks.py.

To explain what I mean I'll have a go at adding this to my fork then let you know if it worked...

[CodeChief]

Getting deeper into this now. I see the DUMB_SCRYPT_DIFF is added to some coins already, which addresses the second part of my question, that properties exist to help calculate correctly in the original methods. In fact these methods have already been updated in the master code to almost match the code in the "..._alt" functions here. So this pull request really should be refactored.

I see the litecoin DUMB_SCRYPT_DIFF is set to 2**16 which is related to the 0.000016 figure some suggest is the difference between Scrypt mining by the Megahash and Bitcoin mining by the Gigahash+ nowadays. I wonder if it should be the more accurate 0.00001526 figure mentioned here. Also I wonder if this whole value can be thrown out and replaced by mathematics related to the total network, pool network and miner speeds? I guess that is something like what @roy7 is working on.

Regarding discovery of this property, it wasn't intuitive at all and looks like an insult to the alt Scrypt coin world, who chose "DUMB..." for the name? It should be refactored to a name explaining what it means and is used for. Something like DIFFICULTY_NORMAL, MIN_DIFFICULTY_DEFAULT or whatever else makes sense.

Anyway my search continues,I want to get this BFGMiner 4.x issue resolved because "P2Pool doesn't follow the stratum protocol" (according to the BFGMiner developer luke-jr)...