Minimum and maximum difficulties

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi,

Last weekend, there was a change in the minimum and maximum static worker difficulties that may have caused problems for customers who use the "d=" password argument. We made two changes. First, we made these values effective on a per-algorithm basis, so that scrypt and x11 have different values. Second, we increased the minimum values temporarily to make the mining server more responsive until parallelization is complete this weekend.

For scrypt, the current range is 65536 to 4194304.
For x11, the current range is 4 to 256.

As always, difficulty does not have any effect on profits, but your miners will be disconnected if you set a "d=" value outside this range. You can either set "d=" to a value inside this range, or remove it entirely and allow variable difficulty to be used. We plan to loosen these restrictions and allow difficulties of 16384 and 1 once we can have multiple servers by restricting the number of miners per server.

It is also possible that there is an additional bug with static worker difficulties, but all the support tickets about that are coming in with vague descriptions, stating that "d=xxxx" is not working or "d=" is "not working." I want to troubleshoot the problem, but I'm not able to reproduce it and am waiting for multiple customers who are encountering the problem to reply with the exact settings they are using so that we can try to correlate the data.

Thanks,

-Steve