Hey folks, I'm getting ready to spin up a bitcoin miner (ASIC-based) and I've been exploring the mining pool options out there. Honestly I didn't really know where to begin, but I did find this listing of mining pools on mempool.space in descending order of blocks mined in the past week:
  1. Foundry USA
  2. AntPool
  3. F2Pool
  4. ViaBTC
  5. Binance Pool
  6. Luxor
  7. SBI Crypto
  8. MARA Pool
  9. KuCoinPool
  10. Unknown
  11. Braiins Pool
  12. Poolin
  13. EMCDPool
  14. BTC.com
Just having quickly searched around, I was leaning towards Braiins Pool (formerly Slushpool), but I do not have much knowledge in this area. In general, Braiins Pool's payout model seems decent though, especially for the small amount of hash rate contribution that I will provide.
Which pool(s) do you have experience with? Would you recommend them? Why or why not?
Hoping to spark a lively discussion :)
Disclaimer I have no personal experience with any pools.
You are doing a good job of thinking of payout threshold, especially if you are going to have a small hash rate.
Braiins pool appears to have a 100,000 sats payout
Roughly how long will it take to get to 100,000 sats with your miner?
I personally would not want to have several months of work "stuck" in a pool. Just waiting to get to the threshold.
Maybe search for Lightning payout to see if any pool supports it.
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For reference at Nicehash, my current projected weekly income is 747936 sats with 4 S19j Pro 104s running.
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Dang, nice setup!
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Thanks!
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Great feedback, thank you!
I will research minimum withdrawals and payout models for these pools to do a more thorough comparison. I agree that it would not be ideal to have my “Work” tied up for months awaiting the payout threshold
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Ok let me share some thoughts, first DYOR, this involves of course asking lots of questions like you are doing here.
Most the mining scene takes place in Telegram groups, to some extent Twitter and in some cases Discord. You need to get in those groups and use the search box.
Something you may already know is that while Bitcoin is all about verifying and not trusting, BUT pools on the other hand are not in the verifying side of the equation. You need to trust their algos for scoring, trust the payouts will come along, trust they won't rampup their fees, trust the hashrate the pool shows is real and its not being faked (your share depends on the denominator size), trust them to pay with new coin, ,... and so on.
You need to be familiar with the concept of difficulty for scoring, this is because the pool verifies you are actually doing the POW of processing for the pool, every couple seconds your miner will produce a share based on a difficulty target that the pool will double check re-doing the same hash, by now you should realize that miners ar not uploading every single hash to the pool.
You need to be absolutely clear on the revenue distribution method: PPS, FPPS, PPLNS, PPS+ and whatever variation or combination. If you trust the pool you will come to the conclusion that PPLNS is the best method, but there is a catch. If you are not online mining when the block is found.. you missed it.
PPLNS is all about pool size and how pron to downtime your mining operation is or how happy poolswap trigger you are. Smaller pools need hours or even days until a block is discovered, so if this is the case and you decided to turn off ur miner or swap just before a block is found.. all the previous hashrate goes for nothing. PPLNS is about assuming the pool risk in the hopes of better rewards and lower fees.
Not all pools are easy to get in and accepted.
At some point you can also solo mine, odds at least seem better than a lottery ticket if you throw in some petahashes from now and then.
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Anyone know how Nicehash fits in here? I was using Luxor but Nicehash has lower fees for me and subsequently higher returns. I can pick my payout so I've been doing 1,000,000 sats in order to have better sized UTXOs.
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Thanks for the link. It sort of answers it. Our fees dropped to 0.5% with Nicehash. I think we were at 1% with Luxor before.
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Despite whatever. DYOR
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