What is fixed difficulty on a mining pool?
Fixed difficulty means your mining pool uses a set difficulty for the work you submit, rather than automatically changing it as your mining speed changes. It controls how often your miner can send a qualifying result, called a share—not how hard it is to create a real Monero block.
What the difficulty setting measures
A mining pool lets you combine your mining work with other people’s work. The pool uses shares as evidence of how much work you contribute, then applies its payout rules to divide rewards.
Your miner keeps trying calculations until it finds a result that meets a target. A share’s difficulty describes how hard that target is to meet:
- Lower difficulty: Your miner finds qualifying shares more often.
- Higher difficulty: Your miner finds qualifying shares less often, but each accepted share represents more work.
With fixed difficulty, that share target stays at a set level unless you or the pool changes it. Depending on the pool, you might select it through a connection setting or use a dedicated connection point, called a port.
How it differs from automatic difficulty
Many pools use variable difficulty, often shortened to vardiff. This automatically adjusts your share difficulty to aim for a practical interval between submissions.
Fixed difficulty does not follow changes in your mining speed. If your computer slows down because you open another program, shares generally arrive less often. If it speeds up, they arrive more often.
This matters for browser mining. Your browser may reduce background activity, and your device may slow down when it gets hot. A fixed setting that works well with an active tab might produce long gaps between shares when that tab is in the background.
Variable difficulty usually handles changing speeds more conveniently. Fixed difficulty can be useful when your mining speed is steady or you want more predictable settings for testing.
What it does—and does not—change
Fixed difficulty does not change Monero’s network difficulty. Network difficulty governs how hard it is to find a block and adjusts every block, with blocks arriving roughly every two minutes.
It also does not make your processor perform more calculations. Your hashrate, meaning the number of mining calculations you complete each second, depends on your hardware, software, and operating conditions.
Most importantly, more shares do not automatically mean more earnings. A properly designed pool credits shares according to the work they represent. Assuming its payout system accounts for difficulty correctly, sending many easy shares should not earn more than contributing the same work through fewer hard shares.
Fees, rejected submissions, and the pool’s payout rules still matter.
Choosing a sensible fixed setting
Start with the pool’s instructions and supported difficulty range. There is no single fixed value that suits every miner.
Watch for these signs:
- Too low: Your miner sends excessive submissions, creating unnecessary network traffic and possibly hitting pool limits.
- Too high: You see long gaps between shares, making it harder to confirm that mining is working and causing short-term reward estimates to fluctuate.
- Suitable: Shares arrive regularly enough to monitor your miner without overwhelming the connection.
If you are unsure, the pool’s automatic difficulty option is usually the easier starting point. Avoid services claiming that a special difficulty setting guarantees higher profits.
The bottom line
Fixed difficulty sets the size of the proof-of-work chunks you submit to a pool. Choose it for reliable share reporting—not as a shortcut to more mining power or guaranteed earnings.
