Thread by @bramcohen

There's a subtle point about pool/farmer 'difficulty' which I misunderstood the question on in the video this morning so I'll try to explain now (thread)

On the actual running network there's what's called 'work difficulty' which determines a quality threshold above which a proof of space successfully qualifies for making a block

There's a subtlety here about timelords and the rate they're running at which don't matter for this explanation. But know there are timelords and they do important stuff which you rarely have to worry about

An important detail is that this is off a strict threshold: Near misses get nothing, and a quality ten times what's necessary gets the same as barely making it. This is an important detail which Satoshi got weirdly well and we've carried over into Chia

The whole point of using a pool is that you get more frequent but still proven rewards, so there's a lower work difficulty of the 'partials' which the farmer submits to the pool to prove that they're harvesting

Because these partials follow a lower work difficulty they happen much more often so the returns to the farmer will be much more reliable (assuming the pool rewards them equitably)

As in the case for the network as a whole an important detail is that they follow a strict threshold: below that they get nothing, above that they don't get extra credit. But what should the difficulty be?

The tradeoff is that the if the difficulty is lower then there's better smoothing because of more events, but that's also a lot more chatter with the pool and work for the harvester

At the extreme low end a single plot can make several partials per day, but that would result in a petabyte farm generating several tens of thousands of events per day, which would be ridiculous

Because different farmers are of different sizes, the difficulty per farmer is configurable. Generally speaking larger farmers should use a larger amount

It takes a small amount of time for a farmer to increase the difficulty they're using to keep them from cranking it up when they happen to find something good. Pools can set a minimum difficulty to keep their load under control

Mostly it isn't material to end users. The difficulty should get set for them automatically and not be of concern. But pool operators should know about it and engineer according to their needs.

As always it's worth repeating that pooling doesn't increase average (mean) rewards. What it does do is make rewards more reliable. A profitable operation will be more consistently profitable. An unprofitable one will be more consistently unprofitable.