How cutting power to Bitcoin miners can actually burn more energy
Summary
Some mining pools may leave share difficulty too high after a miner sharply reduces its hashrate if their vardiff controller updates only when a share arrives. The resulting share drought can delay pool accounting and payments, though rare high-difficulty shares may still receive appropriate credit. Stratum V2’s reference implementation uses timed recalculation to recover, but recovery may be slow, and that behavior is not guaranteed across all deployments. Analysts identify ckpool as a share-triggered example, but the prevalence and real-world losses are unknown. Operators can use an open-source proxy to simulate hashrate declines and test controller recovery.
