Bitcoin Forum

Hi there,

I am fairly new to Bitcoin, and have been mining on BTCmine for the last week. What I would like to know is which mining pool is the most popular at the moment, and would likely grant me the highest payout for my miner.

I am running on a single Radeon HD 6950 2gb, with an average speed of approx. 340 Mhash/s with GPUminer. I have also been looking into Phoenix miner, but I hear there are problems at the moment.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

If you're going for the most popular, deepbit is still the leader in terms of overall hashrate. btcguild is also a well-respected pool and should have better payouts over time as it has no fees. But what's wrong with btcmine?

I have mined EXTENSIVELY on all the major pools, and in the long run generally as a rule the rewards are supposed to even out - but let me save you some time

the two best pools by far are deepbit.net and mining.bitcoin.cz
but I have switched to deepbit because I feel that they have the most state of the art server and statistics.

don't get me wrong slush's pool is awesome (mining.bitcoin.cz)
but for now im going to be at deepbit

If I were you, and in the mood for a new pool, I would give one of the newer small pools a shot. It's good for the overall health of the network to keep the hash power distributed.

If you want, I can do a breakdown of why the smaller pool "Eligius" is better and deserves your attention...

BTC Guild is rapidly growing since it has proven stable with the new dedicated hosting. It also has 0% fees with benefits for donators, a great community, slick and clean web interface, and very transparent block statistics (one of the few pools i know that will give a blockexplorer link for each block, list a breakdown of payouts to each miner by account id for each block, list how much the pool made in donations, and how much the pool has kept in transaction fees).

Numerous other benefits, definitely worth giving a shot if you are looking for a new pool.
I would also like to suggest, that as you are searching for a pool, please give each pool a greater than 24 hour window to determine critical stats like average earnings and stability. Too many times I've been seeing 12 and 24 hour breakdowns of pools, which is such a horrible window to try and get an accurate rating of anything.

Indeed. If you try a new pool, you need to leave your miners on it for at least 72 hours straight, and measure your earnings for that time period.

I've mined around a bit, but switched to BTC Guild when it got up to speed and I have to say it's the one I like best so far. It has attractive features, and I think eleuthria has handled the growth of the pool in a quite competent way, considering it's not much more than three weeks since it was opened up for use.

I've been incredibly happy with BTC Guild, even when the server was overloaded.

Actually, the only possible reason I'd switch away from it is if it gets too big.  :(

I tested BTC Guild and Slush's pool, and I'm making nearly twice as much on Slush's pool. Go figure. :)

How long was your test?

I calculated my estimated BTC per day based on my total hashing power and the current difficulty, and I'm getting very, very close to that on BTC Guild.

I went from Slush to BTC Guild, I'm making about 10% more on BTCGuild than on slush.

*cough*luck*cough*why trying to compare doesn't work*cough*

I really didn't expect so many great answers :). Thanks everyone for your timely responses, though I couldn't get to them right away. It looks to me like BTC Guild and deepbit are the two major contenders, but I am also interested in a lot of the brand new pools that are starting up. What would the advantage be of joining a smaller newer pool over some of the large ones?

Lastly my problem with BTCMine at the moment hasn't been identified. For some reason or other my profile says I am being sent payments in the proper increments, but they don't seem to be showing up in my Bitcoin client. I'm sure it's not really a problem with the pool itself, but this still presents an opportunity for me to investigate other options while I'm not mining.

Also Quantumplation, please feel free to give me a breakdown of why Eligius may be better for me. I am always open to suggestions :).

Disclaimer: I run a pool so may be biased.
One advantage of using a smaller pool is that it improves the overall resiliency of the mining infrastructure. When deepbit went down, there was a significant loss of overall hashing power. All that power consentrated in one place means you have a single point of failure. There is also the fact that Deepbit has on at least one occasion hit a point where it controled half the bitcoin mining capasity. Meaning that it may have been possible for them to be able to double-spend.

The only drawback to joining a smaller pool is that of increased variance between payouts. However, in the long run, your payouts will be the same regardless of the size of the pool with the exception of those charging fees.

So basically the size of the pool only really alters the frequency (through an amount reduction) of payouts?

Right. You can get your 1BTC/day on the huge pool, or 7BTC/week on the small pool.

You should also consider the reward system used by every pool.

72 hours isn't enough, certainly not with any of the smaller pools.

Variance is also higher on small pools, so in this example you would either get 1 BTC/day +/- 0.1 BTC or 7 BTC/week +/- 2 BTC.

Yes, that means you can earn more, the smaller the pool gets (with the extreme of solo mining --> either zero or everything) BUT also you have the equal chance of bad luck.

The bigger the pool, the more steady and less fluctuating your income will be (this does NOT mean there will be no flutuations, even big pools have luck streaks or bad luck streaks since big pool still means only a relatively low 2-digit percentage of the network)