Worker

A worker is a named identifier assigned to an individual mining device (or group of devices) within a mining pool account. Workers allow miners to track performance, diagnose issues, and manage multiple machines from a single pool account.

Understanding Workers

When you connect a mining device to a pool, you configure it with a worker name, typically in the format account.workerName. This name is sent to the pool during the Stratum authorization step. The pool then tracks hashrate, shares, and other statistics separately for each worker.

Think of workers like employee badges in a factory. The factory (pool) knows every employee (mining device) by their badge number (worker name). This lets the factory manager (you) see which employees are performing well, which are slacking, and which called in sick (went offline).

Most pool dashboards display per-worker information including:

• Current hashrate: Real-time and averaged hashrate for the device
• Share submission rate: How many shares the device is submitting
• Rejection/stale rate: The percentage of submitted shares that were invalid or stale
• Online status: Whether the device is currently connected and working
• Temperature and other metrics: Some pools relay hardware statistics reported by the firmware

Tip

Use descriptive worker names that help you identify devices quickly. Common naming conventions include location-based names (e.g., “rack1-shelf2-pos3”), model-based names (e.g., “S21-001”), or serial numbers. This becomes critical when managing dozens or hundreds of machines.

Practical Example

A miner runs 50 ASIC machines and connects them all to the same pool account “myFarm”. Each machine is configured as a separate worker: “myFarm.rack1-01” through “myFarm.rack5-10”. On the pool dashboard, the miner can see that “myFarm.rack3-07” has a hashrate 30% lower than expected and a high rejection rate, indicating a potential hardware issue that needs attention.

See also

• Mining Pool
• Stratum
• ASIC