Why Ping Alone Doesn’t Tell the Full Story in Bitcoin Mining

We see a lot of talk around timing, which is great, but for newer folks it often gets oversimplified and muddies the waters a bit. There are multiple layers to it, but once you separate them it becomes much easier to understand. So I figured I’d do a quick breakdown in simple terms.

🌎 Block Propagation and Template Timing

Block propagation and template timing = how quickly the pool, or your own node, learns about a new block, updates its view of the chain, builds a fresh block template with the best available transactions based on its policy and configuration, and gets ready to push work downstream. If this layer is slow, you’re already mining stale work before your miner ever sees a new job.

⚡ Prevhash and mining.notify Timing

Prevhash and mining.notify timing = how quickly that new work actually reaches your miner after a block change. This is the timing race miners care about. Stale work means wasted hashes.

🔌 Stratum Connection

Stratum connection = your persistent TCP connection to the pool. Both latency and stability matter. Packet loss, retransmits, bad routing, overloaded WiFi, bufferbloat, and disconnects all show up here.

📶 Ping

Ping = simple ICMP latency. It’s useful for rough network distance, but it doesn’t measure block propagation speed, template generation time, or how fast Stratum jobs are actually delivered.

A pool, or locally run node, can have excellent ping and still deliver slower work updates. On the flip side, a slightly higher ping pool can outperform others if its infrastructure, peering, and propagation are better.

🧠 Other Edge Cases

There are other edge cases too: share submission latency, extranonce handling, miner firmware, ASIC job switching, pool server load, and server side queuing.

⛏️ Why This Matters

Why does this matter? Because more hashes = more chances to hit a block.

If your node or pool learns about a new block seconds after most of the network, takes extra time to build a fresh template, or delays getting that notify to your miner for any of the reasons above, that’s lost work. Your miner is powered on, consuming electricity, and hashing away… but it’s hashing the wrong template.

For perspective, a consistent 2 second delay on each new block notification adds about 29 hours of lost hashing time per miner over the course of a year.

As home miners we’re already at a hashrate disadvantage compared to the big players. We should be maximizing every hash whenever possible.

That’s why “my ping is 12ms” by itself doesn’t tell the full story.

Posted: 2026-05-24