Thanks for the detail here about the way ETH works and how the miner interacts with it. I had a feeling there was more to it but the way I described was about as much detail as I knew from a total beginner point of view.
Ultimately, I think most won't know how to modify the miner and just use it as it is so what you said in the final sentences will probably be enough
"Proof Frequency is merely the expected frequency at which a proof is found and sent to the contract on Ethereum"
The contract is made so that it rejects old proofs. I think someone asked about it in Discord yesterday and a member of the team answered that old proofs are not accepted. The timing of submitting the proof matters because it varies how much KOIN you get for it.
Thank you so much for the additional info! So if I understand it as you've explained now, you can have the miner running and it will just submit the valid hash to the ETH network straight away, regardless of Proof Frequency. Then it will return KOIN to the miner depending on if the proofs are accepted by the network and the timing of them?
I found this pretty useful too actually, really well explained regarding Proof Frequency:
https://github.com/open-orchard/koinos-gui-miner#understanding-proof-frequency
Yes, when the miner finds a valid hash, it submits the hash (proof) to the mining contract on Ethereum immediately. The Proof Frequency is merely the expected frequency (the time interval that has the highest likelihood between found proofs) at which valid proofs are found at the particular difficulty associated with that Proof Frequency. What the contract on Ethereum does upon being provided a valid proof is that it mints an amount of KOIN ERC-20 tokens primarily depending on the difficulty of mining at the time when the proof was found and sends it to a wallet address specified by the user of the miner.
Perfect, thanks for clarifying all that 😃