Three steps to find out whether distance is costing you anything.
Step one runs in this browser and takes about five seconds. Step two is a small script you run at home. Step three is reading the answer without kidding yourself.
- 01Time one trip5 seconds
- 02Run the real check10 minutes
- 03Read your numbersa minute
Before you start, here is the loop you are measuring. Somewhere in the world a block gets found. The pool hears about it, builds a fresh puzzle, and pushes it out to your miner. Your miner drops whatever it was working on and starts the new one. Anything it sends in after that switch is work on a puzzle somebody already solved, and it counts for nothing. That handoff is the only place distance can cost you, and it comes around about once every two and a half minutes.
Twelve requests, back to back. The fastest one is the cleanest read on the path, because every sample carries your own machine’s noise on top of the real distance and never below it.
What you just timed is a web request to this site, the same kind of request that loaded this page. It is not your miner’s connection, and the machine serving this page is not always the machine your miner connects to. Browsers are not allowed to open the kind of connection a miner opens. That is not a limitation we chose, and it is why step two exists.
Here is one block of mining time, with the farthest any miner has been measured sitting from this pool drawn on it: 277 ms, from the other side of the planet. Even that had to be blown up 10 times to be visible at all. Time your own trip above and this bar redraws with your number.
Run the real check on your own network
This is the measurement a browser cannot make. It is one Python file, about 14 KB, with nothing to install. It opens the same kind of connection your miner opens, asks for work the way your miner asks, and times every stage of it.
You need Python 3. macOS and most Linux machines already have it. On Windows, install it from python.org and tick the box that says Add to PATH.
Run it on the same internet connection your miners are on. Your home wifi is fine. A laptop tethered to your phone gives you your phone’s answer, not your miner’s.
It asks for a payout address because that is how a miner introduces itself. There is no signup, no key, and nothing to create. The script only ever talks to the destinations you type on the command line.
curl -O https://lite.nexuspool.io/np-stratum-probe.py python3 np-stratum-probe.py --addr YOUR_ADDRESS lite.nexuspool.io:3354
python3 np-stratum-probe.py --addr YOUR_ADDRESS --tips 3 lite.nexuspool.io:3354 other-host:port
Point it at more than one destination and it sits and waits for a real block, then reports who handed out fresh work first. Same machine, same clock, same block, so there is nothing to take on faith. It ships with no list of pools and recommends none.
Read your numbers
The probe prints one row per destination. Three of these columns are plumbing. One of them is the answer.
- DNS
- looking up the name. Happens once, at start.
- Connect
- opening the connection. Once, at start.
- Handshake
- your miner introducing itself. Once, at start.
- WORK
- the pool hands over a puzzle. This one repeats, and this one is the answer.
The first three happen when your rig plugs in and then never again while it mines. If you take one thing off this page, take that.
- Under a secondnothing to do.
- One to five secondsstill nothing to do. You could not measure the difference over a year of mining.
- Twenty seconds or more, block after blockthat is real, and that is worth acting on.
NexusPool sat about 277 ms away from all three, which is the wrong side of the planet for two of them. It still handed out fresh work first in six of the nine races, twice by more than twenty seconds. The same new block reached all three continents within 15 to 26 ms of each other, out of one machine.
We lost three of the nine. All three were from Frankfurt, and all three by about half a second. That is the honest shape of it. Being close buys you a fraction of a second. Being quick to notice a block buys you twenty.
Whatever you go after first, it is not distance.
So what do you do with this
If step two came back clean, you are done. Point a miner at the pool and leave it alone. Distance is not the thing standing between you and a block.
If it came back slow, look at your own side of the wire first. The wifi hop between the rig and the router, the router itself, anything doing traffic shaping on the way out. A pool cannot make your local network faster, and moving to a closer one will not fix it either.
If it came back slow against us and clean against somewhere else, that is a bug on our side. The probe’s output is the entire bug report. Bring it to the forum and we will go look.
- Host
- lite.nexuspool.io
- Port
- 3354
Questions people actually ask
Less than almost anyone assumes. The introduction between your rig and the pool is paid once, when it connects, and never again while it mines. The only latency that costs you is the one-way trip of a fresh puzzle after a block is found, and that is a sliver of a two-and-a-half-minute gap. We measured it on a desk-sized miner: a 274 ms difference in distance came to roughly ten satoshis a year. The odds of hitting a block come from network difficulty and how fast your machine hashes. Neither one has a distance in it.
No, and we have the receipts on that. What matters is when the pool hands your rig fresh work after a block is found, and that depends mostly on how fast the pool hears about the block at all. From about 277 ms away, across three real blocks in July 2026, we handed out fresh work first in six of nine races against destinations sitting inside the miner's own region, twice by more than twenty seconds. Close and slow beats you to nothing.
No. Miners and pools talk over a raw connection that browsers are not permitted to open, so no web page can perform that handshake or time when a rig actually receives work. A browser can time an HTTP request, which shows you the rough shape of the path and nothing more. That is what step one on this page does, and it says so. Step two is a small script with no dependencies that you run on the same network as your miners, and that one measures the real thing.
Run the probe from the same connection your miners use, pointed at the host in step two. It reports where every millisecond went: the name lookup, the connection, the introduction, and the moment usable work actually arrived. Give it two or more destinations and it races them over the same real block from your own machine, so the comparison does not depend on anybody's clock being right. It ships with no pool list and recommends nothing.