Best Share and "Closest Brush": How to Read Your Near-Misses

SoloLuck Blog · 2026-06-30

First, what a share even is

Every few seconds your miner sends the pool a share — a hash that clears a small target called your share difficulty. Share difficulty is just a yardstick the pool uses to count your work; it is far, far easier to hit than the real Bitcoin network difficulty. SoloLuck tunes your share difficulty automatically with vardiff (variable difficulty), aiming for roughly one share every few seconds based on how fast you hash. Every client starts at a base difficulty of 4000, and the port you pick sets a floor — the lowest difficulty vardiff will use for you (if that floor sits above 4000, you simply start there): :3333 Lite (floor 1,024), :8081 Standard (131,072), :4334 Pro (1,048,576), or :3335 Nano (floor 1).

Here is the key idea for this whole post: most shares are unremarkable, just barely clearing that small target. But once in a while a share is far luckier than it needed to be — its hash comes out much smaller (harder) than your share difficulty required. That lucky outlier is exactly what we are about to read.

Your best share = your luckiest hash

Your best share is simply the single highest-difficulty share you have ever submitted to SoloLuck — your luckiest hash so far. When your miner happens to produce a hash much smaller (harder) than your share target demanded, the pool records that share's actual difficulty. If it beats your previous record, it becomes your new best share.

A few things follow from that:

• Best share only ever moves up, and only when you break your own record — so it can sit unchanged for hours or days, then jump.
• It measures luck, not effort. On a good day a small Bitaxe can post a higher best share than a big rig that simply has not gotten lucky yet.
• More hashing means more chances at a lucky outlier, so over weeks your best share tends to drift upward — but each new record is its own independent roll of the dice.

On SoloLuck you will find your best share on your address stats page, sitting right next to your hashrate and worker list.

Closest brush: turning best share into "1 in N"

"Closest brush" puts your best share in human terms. The math is a single division:

• closest brush = network difficulty ÷ your best-share difficulty, written as "1 in N".

A real SoloLuck example: a best share of about 18.2 billion measured against the current network difficulty of about 133.9 trillion gives a closest brush of roughly 1 in 7,343. In plain words, that luckiest hash got about one seven-thousandth of the way to the difficulty a real block needs. The smaller N gets, the closer the brush — and if N ever reaches 1 (a single share whose difficulty meets or beats the network's), that share is a block and you have won.

That is why the stat is fun to watch: it shrinks an almost unimaginable number down to a personal best you can actually root for, a little like a high score.

It's a progress stat, not a near-miss

Here is where honesty matters. "Closest brush" sounds like you nearly won — you did not. A best share is not a near-miss in any payout sense, and it is worth nothing: no money, no partial reward, no credit banked toward a block. On SoloLuck you are paid only when you actually find a block, and then nearly the whole reward goes straight to your own address (minus the 2% fee, which is charged only when a block is found — no block, no fee, ever). Best share is a scoreboard, not a paycheck.

It is also not a countdown. Posting "1 in 7,343" today does not mean you are 1/7,343 of the way through some queue, or that a smaller N is now "due". Each share is an independent dice roll. Your closest brush is a record of the single luckiest roll so far — a fun, real, motivating number, but a souvenir of past luck, never a promise about the future.

How it relates to — but doesn't predict — finding a block

Best share and block-finding are the same underlying event: every hash your miner makes is compared to a target, and a block happens when one hash clears the network target. Your best share is just the closest any of your hashes has come to that target — which is why "1 in 1" literally is a block.

But your best share does not predict or improve your odds. In true solo mining your share difficulty only controls how often you submit shares and how big your best-share numbers get — it never changes your chance of finding a block. That chance depends only on your total hashrate. The whole SoloLuck pool today (~28.5 TH/s) averages about 640 years to a block; one 100 TH/s S19 averages roughly 180 years; a 1 TH/s Bitaxe around 18,000 years. Because mining is memoryless (a Poisson lottery), those are long-run averages, not timers — you could hit tomorrow or never, and tiny-miner wins, though rare, do really happen. A rising closest brush just means you are hashing and catching the occasional lucky roll. Nothing more — and that is plenty to enjoy.

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