One of the parameters that you can track in your hash-power order details is called “Extra rewards”. Since there is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about this order information, we decided to explain it in more detail in this article.

To understand the logic behind extra rewards, you must have a good understanding of how NiceHash works. In short, as a buyer, you rent hash power (computing power) from miners (sellers) connected to NiceHash and you pay for this service in Bitcoins. NiceHash serves as a broker and sends hash results to your selected pool. Pools are responsible for paying out the end result of rented hash power - actual coins. It is very important for us that miners get paid in full for their valid work (running mining rigs) and that the buyers only pay for valid work that has been submitted to the pool (just as if the buyers were using their own mining rigs).

Sometimes buyer's pools generate lots of work restarts. This might happen because coins have a very low difficulty or because multi-pools are switching coins very fast and don’t have an efficient coin switching algorithm. In some cases, this is also a result of some custom private pools.

Excessive work restarts reduce the efficiency of miners, especially on fast ASIC miners with weak controllers. We have addressed this issue by rewarding providers (miners = sellers) with extra shares or “extra rewards” paid by buyers when fast work restarts occur. In essence, if your pool is generating a lot of work restarts we have to penalize you to protect the miners. The extra rewards serve as compensation for miners to replace the lost income during the work restarts. Extra reward for miners is like an “extra penalty” for buyers. 

To avoid paying for extra rewards make sure your pool is responsive and configured correctly. If you are paying for extra rewards, this is a good indication that something is wrong with the pool. Contact the pool operator or switch to some fully compatible pool. A list of fully compatible pools can be found here. 

With properly optimized pools, buyers don’t pay for any extra rewards!