Bitcoin Forum

Feedback on 50btc?

Yes

good times

42

You beat me to it, I was going to say 7.

When I was new to bitcoin I chose the 50btc mining pool for a couple of reasons

1) They have an intuitive and polished website, as well as a couple of great guides to start you mining.
2) They have a rather large presence in the bitcoin mining community, which means they're somewhat trusted
3) Their website feedback was prompt
4) The 50miner software was a personal favorite, and I found that I liked the options it gave me.

Now months later, I can't say I'm disappointed at all.  I have never had a problem with payouts, downtime, or anything.  I've simply left my miner running and collected the profits when I want them.

Keep in mind however, that 50btc has a steady payout (and assumes some risk because of this) the pool does not factor in transaction fees when blocks are found.  It keeps these, and the miners never see them.  For now it is rather inconsequential, but in the future, (4 years or so from now) I will likely take this into greater account as the block reward is halved again.

50btc is definitely a nice site and pool I think, it wasn't as frustrating to deal with for me as other websites because they had laid everything out sensibly.

I have had no problem with them. Nice website, nice return. You just have to wait till you get to BTC0.01 to pull out earnings. All the Big PPS pools are pretty much the same.

I use them and like them.

50btc is great in terms of reliability and steady payouts but keep in mind they're taking transaction fees + an additional 3% fee out of your mining rewards.  I like using BitMinter since they split tx fees between miners and let you set a 0% pool fee. (if you're willing to wait for blocks to mature and are okay with not using their API).

But, 50btc is a big pool for a reason; it's easy to use, it's reliable, your payouts are predictable, and people like it because of that.

I wonder if they will be ready for ASIC.

How do they compare to BTC Guild?

The only reason I would choose BTC Guild is because they have merged mining. 50BTC tracks things better and has a lower minimum payout.

What does 50 BTC track that BTC Guild does not currently?  Also, the BTC Guild minimum payout was dropped at the beginning of the year to 0.02 [which is less than $1], and will be dropped again in the event that a rally takes us to where the minimum payout is more than $1 again.

I prefer Bitparking (http://mmpool.bitparking.com/pool) for less fees and merged mining.

*shrug* since i got back, i pointed my rigs to BTC Guild and so far so good, was just wondering if there was enough impetus to switch, alas not...

me gusta 50miner. they make mining super easy for the n00b. This is something the other pools should learn from.

50BTC has a 3% PPS fee, and BTC Guild has a 5% PPS fee.  The merged namecoin mining on BTC Guild probably makes up for the extra 2% fee, and BTC Guild's Stratum support theoretically means fewer stale/rejected shares.  I briefly mined on 50btc a while ago and never had a problem with rejected shares and I think they also pay for stales. 

BTC Guild also offers a 3% fee PPLNS option which could lead to less consistent payouts but 2% more than their PPS (due to fee difference) on average.  

Your best option would be to try out each pool for a week or so and compare your results.  I'd pick BTC Guild's PPLNS if I had to pick between the two pools.

PPLNS will actually average closer to 3% higher than BTC Guild PPS since it includes transaction fees, which now average > 1% of the block reward most of the time, putting the effective fee under 2% (and it includes orphans, which is 0.5-1% extra payout over pools that don't).

50BTC still doesn't have stratum support, and they barely got user-selectable share-diff (and no VarrDiff yet), correct? That kinda makes it a questionable choice for looking at the future.

it would be nice to get one