A few farmers have requested the option to set difficulty higher due to the belief that submitting fewer partials causes less hardware load with the standard Chia farmer. We believe that this is not true (load along with the power consumption is +/- the same), but still, a few users have asked us to add an option to raise the difficulty to troubleshoot their stale rate — to check if low difficulty is the reason behind them having >0 stales. We value our customers’ feedback and we have added an option to set the farming difficulty manually.
To do so, go to Settings in your Flexpool.io farming dashboard. You will need to specify the Launcher ID and use the Login Link from the Chia client to modify the difficulty. Please note that a higher difficulty will result in fewer partials submitted, affecting the accuracy of your statistics. Please do not change the difficulty if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Would it also be possible to specify payouts not in terms of amount but rather time (e.g., once per day, or week if a given payout minimum threshold is met)?
For farmers who have (say) 500TB or more, Difficulty 1 means submitting A LOT of partials. Conversely, as one with a measly 115 plots, I love the fixed Dif1.
The Auto Difficulty on other pools always cost me points, because they ramp up too aggressively, meaning far too long between partials, and a bigger loss if one is missed for whatever reason. They’ll revert to Dif1 after 30 mins or an hour (depending on the pool) but that’s a long time with no partials and makes for wild swings in share. The notion that any Difficulty will work out to the same result over time, while mathematically correct, doesn’t always hold up against the imperfections of the real world.
I think all pools should allow farmers to choose a difficulty based on their farm size - assuming they understand how Difficulty works.
So I applaud Flex for adding this feature.
@Chris22: Does this also apply to FlexFarmer, or only to Chia Classic?
