Share is a computational result produced by a miner that meets the difficulty configured by the pool and is submitted to the server for verification. Shares provide a measurable way for a mining pool to track the work performed by each participant.

During mining, hardware performs a very large number of hash operations. Most results have no significance for the blockchain network. If a pool required miners to submit only results meeting the full network difficulty, a small miner could go for a very long time without submitting anything. The pool would therefore have no practical way to continuously measure whether the device was working and how much work it was performing.

How a Share Is Created

  1. The pool creates or receives a current mining job.
  2. The job is sent to the miner through the communication protocol.
  3. The miner performs computations.
  4. A result meets the configured share difficulty.
  5. The miner submits the result to the pool.
  6. The pool verifies and either accepts or rejects it.

Share vs. Block

A share should not be confused with a block. They operate at different difficulty levels.

Property Share Block
Difficulty Configured by the pool for work accounting Defined by the network
Frequency Designed to be frequent enough for statistical tracking Much lower
Economic role Used to calculate the participant’s contribution Creates eligibility for the block reward

Occasionally, a share also satisfies the network-level requirement. In that case, it can represent a block discovery. Most shares, however, serve only as evidence of completed work for the pool’s internal accounting.

Types of Shares

Depending on the result and the time at which it is submitted, a share can be accepted, rejected, or considered stale. Pool monitoring therefore commonly distinguishes Valid Share, Invalid Share, and Stale Share.