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When I mine, I get something that says:

miner  22:09:05|main  Mining on PoWhash #45feeecf… : 6761650 H/s = 3407872 hashes / 0.504 s

What does PoWhash mean? I'm assuming that the #45feeecf… is a partial hash of the current block I'm mining?

niksmac
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Alec
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4 Answers4

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I searched the ethminer code for the string "Mining on PoWhash" and found it in libethereum/ethminer/MinerAux.h. Looking there I see this line:

minelog << "Mining on PoWhash" << current.headerHash << ": " << mp;

And a few lines above it:

EthashProofOfWork::WorkPackage current;

Based on those lines (and the way current is treated elsewhere in the code) I'd say that PoWhash is the hash of the header of the "work package" (or new block) ethminer is currently trying to mine. Not sure how it's being formatted there, though. Looks like it's being partially encoded as UTF-8 or ASCII or something along those lines.

ryepdx
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PoWhash is the proof-of-work hash.

As you have assumed, you can see in the following ethminer log of a successfully mined block that the PoWhash string matches the first 7 characters of the Header-hash of the solution found:

miner  04:35:37.957|ethminer  Mining on PoWhash #1fe4f34a… : 62291643 H/s = 12582912 hashes / 0.202 s
miner  04:35:38.160|ethminer  Mining on PoWhash #1fe4f34a… : 41527762 H/s = 8388608 hashes / 0.202 s
  ℹ  04:35:38.391|ethminer  Solution found; Submitting to http://192.168.4.120:8545 ...
  ℹ  04:35:38.391|ethminer    Nonce: 71f8dd92f2e5d1b8
  ℹ  04:35:38.391|ethminer    Mixhash: 6010589e9b344db567a348a241fe789692115e8cebe747177b1e552986cb50d8
  ℹ  04:35:38.391|ethminer    Header-hash: 1fe4f34acda81a9c15965a66c80e7349758a0aaa1333cb85ae88d4e103d79a7f
  ℹ  04:35:38.391|ethminer    Seedhash: 63ca6f54b1af76dd4df3b908cee464ff1f212f08352cbe7eb4422806bb0c7885
  ℹ  04:35:38.391|ethminer    Target: 00000000000b1594aa498c4e48c1574062852be9a52ffa9dcfeab617ce65644a
  ℹ  04:35:38.392|ethminer    Ethash: 000000000008b905c32b3f7724a960b490618d1294822380f5db0eebeac12c86
  ℹ  04:35:38.393|ethminer  B-) Submitted and accepted.
BokkyPooBah
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so i found a solution, and the header-hash matches the PoW. If is was solo mining would this have been a big payout? do i get a larger share of the successfully found block? i am mining on Ethereumpool.co

Tino Collias
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PoW is "Proof of Work"

According to Wikipedia: A proof-of-work (POW) system (or protocol, or function) is an economic measure to deter denial of service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from the service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-work_system

Bruce Seymour
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