BFGminer sections

BFGminer is my program of choice for mining Bitcoins. It took me a while to understand all of the different lines of output and what they meant in the BFGminer console window. I figured I would share what I have learned about what BFGminer is displaying in its stats.

Line 1 - Version and Date

• Name of program (BFGminer)
• Version number (3.2.0)
• Date program started
• Total Time Mining

Line 2 - Admin Stuff

• M - Manage Devices
• P - Pool Management
• S - Settings
• D - Display Options
• H - Help
• Q - Quit

Line 3 - Pool Info

• Pool URL
• Difficulty given by pool
• Protocol (stratum or other)
• Username on pool

Line 4 - Network Info

• Part of the blocks hash value (...1235ABCD)
• Block number on pool
• Current Block difficulty (149M = 149,000,000)
• Current network speed (1.07 Ph/s = 1,070,000 Gh/s)
• Date/time of current blocks start

Line 5 - Overall Stats

• ST: Work in queue
• F: Network Failures
• NB: New blocks detected
• AS: Shares in submission process
• BW: Bandwidth (up / down)
• E: # of shares * difficulty / 2kB of bandwidth
• U: Shares per minute
• BS: Best Share (highest difficulty block solved)

Line 6 - Combined Device Info

• Number of active mining devices (2 in this picture)
• 3 Speed numbers in Mh/s
  • First speed is last 5s avg speed
  • Second speed is All Time Average (for this program run)
  • Third speed is Effective Average (actual performance taking into account failures etc)
• A: Accepted Shares
• R:0+0: Rejected Shares + Discarded shares (and percent of total)
• HW: Hardware errors (total number / percent of total)

Each devices line

• Name of device
• 3 Speed numbers in Mh/s
  • First speed is last 5s avg speed
  • Second speed is All Time Average (for this program run)
  • Third speed is Effective Average (actual performance taking into account failures etc)

Message Area

Each line here gives a current status of the connection to the mining pool, and what your client is saying to the pool. Some of the common lines you see when bitcoin mining are:

[2013-09-25 12:06:17] Accepted 7b71d2c8 ICA 0 Diff 2/2

• First is the date and time of the event
• "Accepted 7b71d2c8 means that the block 7b71d2c8 has been computed, submitted, and accepted by the pool
• ICA 0 is the device used for this calculation
• Diff 2/2 is the actual difficulty of the block you solved, a slash, and the requested difficulty of your client
  • Diff X/2 means I am requesting difficulty level 2 problems, and X is the difficulty of the problem I solved-- the higher the number the more shares, and the higher the number the more BTC payout. The largest X value is displayed in the BS: statistic

[2013-09-25 12:06:27] Stratum from pool 0 requested work update

• This line is just saying the pool is asking you how your calculations are going

External Links

• BFGminer Homepage
• BFGminer Github - repository on Git of BFGminer
• Bitcointalk Forums - Using BFGminer, changelog, compatibility
• Bitcoin.it - BFGminer description (very good one)