How to choose a cryptocurrency mining pool
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- Created: Monday, 20 April 2020 05:00
Mining Pool - a specialized service for miners, which combines hundreds or thousands of mining computers into one. Small and medium miners are added to the pools, whose capacity is not enough to find at least one or two blocks per day, i.e. with the help of the pool, miners receive a stable daily income, thus eliminating the element of luck, which may not be on your side for several months. Those. If your hashrate does not allow finding on average at least one block in 1-2 days, then it is better to pay a small commission to the mining pool and receive a reward for mining stably according to calculations. For popular cryptocurrencies Bitcoin, Ethereum, even large miners with equipment worth millions of dollars use the pool, because the number of participants is so large that even such large miners prefer to pay 1-2% of the commission than to maintain equipment for a week, pay for electricity and wages and, in the end, get nothing in return just because the probability theory was on the other side . If we have already figured out why to use the mining pool, then we will talk in more detail about how to choose it correctly.
Choosing the right mining pool is no less important than choosing the equipment and the cryptocurrency itself for mining. Because from the wrong choice of pool, you can not only lose part of the income, but also completely remain without payment for the operation of your equipment.
When choosing a pool, you should pay attention to 6 main factors:
Hashrate mining pool
A hashrate is probably the main indicator from which you should begin to consider this or that pool for connection. And the larger the pool, the more stable payments to miners will be and the more miners trust this pool, i.e. He is always online, has a low percentage of commission and honestly distributes profits among the participants. You should not choose pools that have less than 1% hash of the entire network, because the lower the hashrate of the pool, the more other factors influence its effectiveness.
For a novice miner, it is better to opt for a pool that owns at least 5% of the total network capacity.
Miner reward system
On different pools, there is a different system for paying rewards to miners, and the smaller the pool, the more this parameter will affect your mining income. The most popular reward schemes are PPS and PPLNS, but there are many others that you can learn more about in this article: Reward mining types Solo, PROP, PPS, PPLNS, PPS +, SMPPS, ESMPPS, RSMPPS, CPPSRB, FPPS, HBPPS, RBPPS, PPSW, POT, BPM, Puddinpop, Eligius, Geometric, DGM, Triplemining, Score. What to choose?
Knowing all the nuances of the pools and their methods of reward, you can even extract a small additional profit of a few percent due to the successful selection of the pool and your role in it (your share in the pool is small or large).
For large pools with a 25-50% share of the entire network, the selection according to the criteria of the reward system is not so relevant, because everything is averaged by the frequent finding of blocks in the network. Those. Any large mining pool is suitable for beginner miners, and what reward system it uses is not so important. And the choice is best made by the following parameter.
Pool commission size
Pool commission is a constant amount that pool owners take from each block found and spend them on maintaining the service or personal needs. The pool commission usually varies from 0.5% to 2%, and accordingly, the lower the commission, the more profitable to use this pool. The trend is observed that the larger the pool, the higher its commission. This is done not only because of the greed of the pool owners, but also because of the possibility of 51% attack, when one pool receives more than 50% of the hashrate and it can manipulate the network for its own selfish purposes. And in order not to undermine the credibility of a particular cryptocurrency, such increased commissions are introduced in order to prevent an increase in the share of the pool close to 50%.
The location of the pool or ping to the server
The distance to the pool server or the signal transit time (ping) is also an important parameter, because the more milliseconds it takes to receive and send tasks for mining, the more theyou will have
not true decisions made. Those. Your mining rig or ASIC will not be in time to send the right decisions in time and the work done simply disappears. With a large number of decisions not made 2% or more, your reward in such a pool will be correspondingly lower by these 2% or even more if the pool is large, and your share in this pool is critically small and the reward in the pool is charged for decisions made in only one Round - PROP reward system.
Ease of use of the pool and anonymity
Pools can be divided into two main types, which require registration without it. Accordingly, pools without registration are easier to use and more anonymous, and you should select these pools if this option is important to you. Pools with registration, in turn, can usually offer more sophisticated management options and performance statistics. What is more important for you, choose such a pool.
Personal Choice
You can completely ignore all our previous recommendations and choose the pool that is not the most profitable just because its developer or owner, your friend, compatriot or in the pool, raised commissions are sent to charity. Those. when choosing a pool, you focus not only on your own material benefits.
P.S. A convenient service for selecting a pool for cryptocurrency mining: miningpoolstats.stream