Hi Crypto Gang!
So I've been looking for a reasonable answer to this for long time now, and no one seemed to be able to answer it. The issue came up again when I switched from mining Litecoin to mining Digibyte for more profitability on a certain day. I was faced with three stratum that I could point my miner to:
URL (difficulty 8192): stratum+tcp://digihash.co:3009
URL (difficulty 32768): stratum+tcp://digihash.co:3033
URL (difficulty 131072): stratum+tcp://digihash.co:3257
I was hooking up my Antminer L3+ to this pool. So the question for me became which stratum do I hook to? And which would essentially lead to higher profits or rather higher rewards calculated.
I search again, ask on forums, search again, and finally found this explanation buried in a forum someplace which was the best explanation I have ever seen.
"The higher difficulty means you will be reporting results less frequently to the pool. This reduces network load on both your system and the pool. It also reduces the restart delay for your mining hardware as it prepares for the next work unit. Most pools base the rewards on the number of difficulty 2 shares accepted. So they increase the reward based on the mining difficulty. If you had four shares accepted at difficulty 4, you would be credited with the reward for 8 shares. Similarly, four shares at difficulty 8 would yield a reward for 16 shares.
So it is to your benefit to set the difficulty high enough to reduce the network and mining delays but not so high that you get a lot of stale shares. Some pools (such as BTC Guild) will automatically adjust the difficulty based on your hash rate."
