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I am running GUIMiner and Triplemining server. I currently have just under 100 "shares" accepted.
What does this mean? What are accepted shares used for? How do accepted shares relate to "blocks"? How does this relate to a Bitcoin?
What does "accepted shares" mean?
Answers
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An accepted share represents work that your miner did towards a round in a mining pool.
When the pool finds a block, it distributes the block reward (i.e. 25BTC) to the miners according to how many shares they have contributed during that round. The more shares you contributed, the more payback you get.
It is simply a way to keep score, and to attribute the reward proportionally to the amount of computing power that each miner contributed to the pool.
Edit: "accepted share" is one which is valid at the time the pool receives the work from the miner, but sometimes the work arrives too late and a new block has replaced the previous one. In these cases you will have some "invalid shares" which don't count towards the revenue share.
Thank you for the answer - it is indeed helpful. I still would like to know, now that I have 130 shares accepted after running a couple of days, is this a significant number, or do I have to accumulate months worth of these before I get a coin, or is part of it just luck? – Tester97 – 2013-12-02T16:03:52.930
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As @smagedy mentioned below, 130 shares doesn't sound like a lot. Please beware of mining with CPU/GPU, as you will probably be spending more on electricity than what you will earn back in bitcoin. Even with some ASICs it's already becoming hard to achieve ROI. Please refer to this thread
– ktorn – 2013-12-09T17:01:38.413