Bitcoin Forum

I started with BTCguild cause they are the biggest. I figured if the majority are mining with BTCguild there must be a good reason. But now i have a few avalons and a few more on the way. So im trying to figure out the best pool based on technical stuff vs who is the biggest. I started looking at the sticky and realized there are alot of pools with many different features and fee structures. I understand the fee part but not the details such as pay TX reward, pay orphans, variable difficulty, local work, merged mining, DGM, PPLNS, PPS, proportional. Im guessing these details mean more than the fee cause if they didnt everybody would be mining with the pools that offer 0% fee. So im hoping somebody here who understands the details can teach me something so i can make an educated decision where i want to mine. Thanks for the information.

Ozcoin.

You need more than one pool.  Just make sure the ones you choose have stratum and variable difficulty and you should be good to go.  Setup failover pools and a Bitcoin-Qt as your last pool.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.msg1146108#msg1146108

The link is to the mining pool list which is at the top of the pool forum.
Sam

I was looking at that post. I read the method description but i dont really understand it. I did not see a description for pay orphans, pay TX reward, variable difficulty, stratum, etc. Would like to understand the details at least a little bit.

Why ozcoin?

You asked for help picking so I gave you a pick. ;)

Ozcoin does all of the things you don't yet understand.  They are all good things for the miner.
Sam

LOL thanks for suggestion. Hopefully i can get a few more opinions and maybe a quick education.

BitMinter.

It is big enough so you get paid regularly but not the largest so you don’t compromise the security by potentially allowing a pool to get to 51% of the network in the future. The Java client is really neat but you are not required to use it if you don’t like. PPLNS so you have the best pay. Small fee. Joined namecoin mining so you get namecoins for free.

Thanks for the recommendation. I also appreciate a brief explanation for your recommendation. Never even heard of namecoin yet. Will google it.

Just search the forums for those terms and you will get allot of information.  There are threads dedicated to the payout systems if you want the technical info behind them.
Sam

OK will try that. If anybody has some time to explain in simple terms for a nub that would be appreciated.

Also, does the size of the pool effect anything of just the features it offers?

Size of the pool only matters if the pool is very small.  Medium sized to large pools will get you about the same payout over periods of time.
Sam

I think i should start by figuring out which method i should mine with. DGM, PPLNS, PPS, proportional. Any suggestions?

DGM or PPLNS.
PPS - only if you need instant payments and simple calculation, but with high pool commission (5-7.5%).
proportional - vulnerable from pool-hopping attack, not recommended.

I will never do PPS again.  It has caused serious damage to good pools and has caused some pools to go completely bankrupt.

I like DGM on Ozcoin I seem to do really well with it.  BTC Guild is a very good pool so I guess I don't mind PPLNS.  There are threads on these forums that explain the theory of operation for these payout methods.
Sam

If you have a fast connection and good disks, mine on p2pool.

Web slicer,

if your're looking for a pool with high availability, resilient, which pays PPLNS with a very low fee (you have avalons, so you can mine there with difficulty 512 or even more) AND gives you half of the block fees of the blocks you find, then without further ado point your miners to HHTT (http://hhtt.1209k.com/).

You'll be one of a few selected miners enjoying the emazing no frills pool we all suckers (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95378.msg1143179;topicseen#msg1143179) have come to love.

:)

spiccioli

Ive been considering DGM pitparking, eclipse, maxbtc with 0% fee.

DGM OZcoin has charges 1% but they are the only DGM pool that pays TX reward. Wondering whats the better deal 0% fee with no TX reward or 1% fee with TX reward.

Also considering PPLNS P2pool with 0% and pay TX reward.

Apparently avalons and p2pool don't work well together, yet.

Interesting, thanks for the tip. This is why i ask questions. Do you know why P2pool doesnt work well with avalons?

It is the short share time combined with the high latency of that particular hardware.  The new version will extend the share time from 10 to 30 seconds, which should make Avalons (and other ASICs) perform decently.  But before the change can happen, we need to have 95% of the hashing power on the new codebase.  At that point, the share chain will hardfork and p2pool will be ASIC heaven.  Could be today, could be 2 weeks.  It all depends on people upgrading or new users joining up with the latest version.

P2Pool mines against your local Bitcoind and that doesn't supply work to an Avalon fast enough.  My local Bitcoin-QT client doesn't even supply work to a Block Erupter fast enough.

DGM eclipse, OZcoin, pitparking, or maxbtc?

What about Eligius? Claims to be 0% fee and with 'shelved' shares approached zero fee PPS.

You need faster disks.  I'm running 61 USB block erupters (equivalent chips to 2 BE blades) on p2pool with getblocktemplate latencies below 0.1 seconds and an overall efficiency of 111% (I earn 11% more because my node is faster than other nodes).

I hear people dont like PPS no more.


What are disks?

Hard drives.  To run a p2pool node (or any bitcoind based mining setup), you need either a SSD drive or a RAID array if you want to stick with spinning disks.

Check out this guide if you are interested in a positive p2pool experience: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153232.0

?? 50BTC is 3rd largest pool, 3% PPS.

How fast of a disk do I need?  I have a 1TB SATA drive.

I think you put your finger on it for me though, your using GBT and I'm using getwork to my client so that probably makes a huge difference.
Sam

I'm a people and I don't like PPS anymore because of the negative impact on pools.  Pools can go into the negative very fast and go bankrupt very easy if they aren't careful.

But I'm most likely in the minority since many other "people" could care less if their pool goes bankrupt.
Sam

So you're not using p2pool, yet running around making claims it won't work? ::)

The guide I linked above recommends SSD drives.  Personally, I'm using a RAID 10 array of 7200 RPM disks.  The size of the disk doesn't have much to do with it's speed.  What matters for this application is the RPMs since you need very fast seek times (which is why SSDs work well, they never have seek delays).

In never said, nor meant to imply it wouldn't work.  Just not well.  But basically yes I'm making an uninformed claim.


Mine is a 7200 RPM disk, but just a single drive.  I'm sure the protocol makes a huge difference in performance.
SAm

So does HD speed with PSpool matter or not? Why would it? Avalon is not connected to my desktop its using wifi.

Im using samsung pro SSD in raid 0.

SSDs in raid 0 would work fantastically, but I hope you know that with RAID 0 if any of the drives go down, you lose all your data.

HD speed does matter because with p2pool you have to actually run a complete bitcoin node and that node has to create the work for your miner.

I understand how raid works. I clone my OS and backup my data on a extra drive.

So my avalon would be more efficient if i stopped using wifi and plugged them in to my desktop with ethernet? Not quite understanding this.

Network shouldn't make that much of a difference.

Please read the guide I linked above.  It explains what you need to know about how p2pool works.  And I'm sorry I offended you by warning you about raid 0.  I'm glad you have good backup policies.  You'd be surprised how many people do things to improve performance without understanding the tradeoffs.

Offended me? Not at all.   :D

I appreciate all the information shared with me.

If you are mining on non-pps pools then you should spread your miners out to more than one pool to minimize variance.  Pools go through periods of good luck and bad so if you are all in on a single pool then you are subject to whatever luck they have.  If you mine multiple pools you usually have another pool having normal or good luck while one pool has bad luck and it equalizes out.

I have mined on 5 or 6 different BTC pools and many other altcoin pools.  For BTC I now mine on bitparking and bitminter both of which I recommend.  DGM is the best payout formula in my opinion.  PPLNS is ok too.  In my experience the relatively higher variance of pools like slush, bitminter, bitparking and others is more profitable in the long run than lower variance pools like BTC Guild or 50BTC.

I noticed my avalon has the option to mine with multiple pools. Is that mining with multiple pools at once or just switching to another pool when your main pool is down?

I am considering DGM pools. I hear its the newest and most advanced method. Plus there seems to be more 0% DGM pools.

Eclipse seems to have a big pool but josh is a tool and BFL is on BS. IDK if i want to support them. People seem to respect graet. And he is the only one paying TX reward. Just wish i knew what that means.

*rolls Dragon Dice* *references chart for result*

You should..... Solo Mine!!!!   :o

heh, actually, any of the pools are ok. the bigger the pool, the more consistent the payout is all.

If you want to transfer bitcoins from one place to another, such as buying something time critical if you include a transaction fee people generating blocks will, most likely, include your transaction quicker if you offer a transaction fee.  At some point in the future transaction fees will surpass the block generation reward.

So pools that share transactions will add that to the 25 BTC block reward.
Sam

Your Avalon is using CGMiner.  The CGMiner thread top post and the readme explain the mining strategies.

----------------------Readme-------------------------------------------
MULTIPOOL

FAILOVER STRATEGIES WITH MULTIPOOL:
A number of different strategies for dealing with multipool setups are
available. Each has their advantages and disadvantages so multiple strategies
are available by user choice, as per the following list:

FAILOVER:
The default strategy is failover. This means that if you input a number of
pools, it will try to use them as a priority list, moving away from the 1st
to the 2nd, 2nd to 3rd and so on. If any of the earlier pools recover, it will
move back to the higher priority ones.

ROUND ROBIN:
This strategy only moves from one pool to the next when the current one falls
idle and makes no attempt to move otherwise.

ROTATE:
This strategy moves at user-defined intervals from one active pool to the next,
skipping pools that are idle.

LOAD BALANCE:
This strategy sends work to all the pools to maintain optimum load. The most
efficient pools will tend to get a lot more shares. If any pool falls idle, the
rest will tend to take up the slack keeping the miner busy.

BALANCE:
This strategy monitors the amount of difficulty 1 shares solved for each pool
and uses it to try to end up doing the same amount of work for all pools.
---------------------------Readme Not-------------------------------------

You could always stay with BTC Guild.  We have cookies!

So many choices. So many decisions to make. What seems to be the most preferred method?

3% fee vs no fee. What would you do? People seem to prefer DGM over PPLNS too.

Depending on what you want, I would use Failover, Rotate, or Balance.

If you want to primarily mine on one pool, use failover with a few backup pools.

If you want to try to lower your variance with multiple pools use Rotate (time based switching) or Balance (difficulty 1 share count based switching).

One pool sounds easiest. Easy is nice. But im wondering what pays more. Should i one pool or multi pool? Im guessing opinions will vary but im sure there are facts behind the opinions.

So OZcoin pays the transaction fee to get BTC transferred quicker? Quicker is nice but that doesnt seem to be a good reason to pay 1% vs 0%. I also noticed maxbtc does not support ASIC. Am i wrong to assume eclipse is the best pool?

Absolutely no strategy is guaranteed to pay you more except for one thing: Making sure you have multiple pools in case one or more fails for whatever reason.

I thought that was someone else's  tag line? :)

I understand no pool or method is guaranteed to pay more. Luck is involved. But i can make an educated decision based on features and fee's. So thats what im trying to accomplish.

In my experience, p2pool will have the best payouts if you have a better than average setup (no fees, transaction fees included in payouts).  Multiple pools will not increase your payout (with the exception of pool hopping on the few pools that are still vulnerable to it, but that's a different conversation), it will only lower your variance.  With multiple pools, you will effectively spend 1/X of your time with X different pools so it evens out the luck.

Even if you intend to only mine on one pool, you should set a failover pool in case your chosen pool goes down for any reason.

No, OZcoin pays you the transaction fees for transactions included in the block.  Many pools only pay out the subsidy (25 BTC) and keep the transaction fees for themselves.

No, i think you misunderstand, or i do. Pools receive fractions of a bitcoin(transaction fees) to include transaction in the blocks they find. Some pools share the fees with the miners, some don't. don't ask me which do which, i don't know. I know Slush Pool does. that is where i mine. I also mine at BTCguild.

No! When a block is solved there are also transaction fees added to it.  So the total reward is Block Plus Transaction fees, 25BTC + Fees.  Total block reward is around 25.2 or so most of the time.  The extra from the fees will be distributed to all miners with the rest of the reward.  0 fee pools usually keep the extra transaction fees as their operation fee.

Block rewards halve every 210,000?? blocks so one day transaction fees will surpass block rewards.
Hope that makes sense now,
Sam

TY for education. I did misunderstand. I thought transaction fee was the fee you get asked to pay to send BTC through nodes quicker. I like the fact that graet shares this with his pool. But it doesnt sound like this is sufficient enough to make 1% fee pool a better option over a 0% fee pool. Especially when you have a substantial amount of hashing power.

Yes, what he said.

You should always 2 or 3 alternate pools in case of a failure or DDoS attack on your main pool.  Your last failover pool should always be your local Bitcoin-QT too so that if all else fails your solo mining at least, that's good for the bitcoin network too.  Just running your bitcoin client helps relay transactions.
Sam

I think im going with esclipse but still considering bitparking. Last few questions before i do. I noticed they have different features. Variable difficulty, local work, and merged mining. How does this work?

https://i.imgur.com/tzQq7lZ.png

Figured out merged mining. Eclipse also mines namecoin. Bitparking mines namecoin, devcoin, and IXcoin. I never heard of these before. Im sure the value is nothing compared to BTC. But it is still something. Should something like this influence my decision making?

Also, that sticky seems to have outdated information. Eclipse does offer merged mining. They also offer conversion from namecoin to BTC.

Dam, bitparking is only offering 0% DGM temporarily. They are going back to 1.5% soon. Looks like im going with eclipse unless somebody can sway me away from eclipse.

Still need to figure out stratum and getwork/GBT.

Those are protocols - there are threads which specialize in the description of them and are easy to find.

Stratum will be best for your Avalons

Do not use getwork for Avalons this is the old CPU/GPU mining protocol

GBT would be OK but Stratum is better for Avalons

Here's info on Namecoin

http://dot-bit.org/Main_Page

I noticed eclipse has 3 different mining servers. Is this considered 1 pool or 3?

https://i.imgur.com/lD8xsCF.png

One pool with 3 servers connected to a common database.  You can setup each server as it's own pool in CGMiner so that it will failover from one server to the next.
Sam

TY sir

Ive been mining with eclipse for a few hours and my BTC earned shows a big fat 0. Im assuming eclipse updates balance every 24 hours? I dont like this "estimated" reward crap. I think BTCguild updated balance every hour. I miss checking my account every few hours and watching the balance go up.   :-\


https://i.imgur.com/U5iwOjt.png

Well it is at 67 Million shares for the round.  Maybe they haven't solved a block yet since you've been mining there.  BTC Guild is the largest pool in existence now so they solve more blocks so you would see your balance increase more often, but in smaller increments.
Sam

Edit: the estimates are usually if a block was found now estimate.  But I'm not familiar with EMC.

Does anybody know if BTC with eclipse gets applied to my balance every 24 hours or when block is found? While switching miners over to eclipse i accidentally started up a few singles with BTCguild server information and even though they were only mining for 10 minutes i had BTC applied to my balance instantly that was available to withdraw. Thats really sweet.

Still debating the fact that BTCguild pays TX reward and orphans but eclipse does not. I also dont like or trust the pool operators of eclipse and would rather support BTCguild or OZcoin. Still not sure who i want to mine with.

BTCguild pool speed says 46GH. Eclipse pool speed says 10TH. Doesnt more hashing power mean more blocks found and more BTC paid?

On average.... variance is very wide for "solo mining", even with 46 GH.

Is that your way of saying "no" more pool hashing power does not mean more BTC ?

More hashing power means more BTC on average.  In the short term, it can vary.

Higher hash rate = more blocks per hour = more consistent payouts in a pool that isn't PPS.

If the difficulty was relatively 'constant' as it was prior to Jan 2013, over a few months it wouldn't matter if you were mining PPS or PPLNS or DGM. The variance would average out between the methods. But now the difficulty is going up 20% every 12 days. So lets say you mine with a small pool, like Eclipse, and it has a bad luck week. You just lost out of income at a difficulty level that is gone forever. Sure it may have a better luck week in the future, but that will be at a higher difficulty, lower income per hash rate.

Perhaps I am seeing this wrong, but in order to maximize your ROI in this rapidly rising hash rate environment, I feel you need to be on a pool that gives consistent even rewards with very little variance. The really big PPLNS pools (BTCGuild) do that as does 50BTC. No surprise they are in the top 3 pools.

BTC Guild is 46 THs not Ghs

46,435Ghs = 46.435Ths

46GH is the same as 46TH? Mind fuck. I thought 1TH was 100GH.

After looking at this i thought eclipse was the bigger pool.

https://i.imgur.com/lD8xsCF.png

Look at the comma and the decimal point in my post.

BTCGuild is 4.6 times larger than EMC.

BTCGuild is the largest pool right now in terms of hash rate.

No. See this comparison thread, updated July 7:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.0

1Ths = 1000Ghs

Terra means Trillion
Giga means Billion

LOL - i got it now. I didnt notice the common and decimal.   :D

Im tired. Been trying to figure this out all day.

I know the feeling :)

I'm well into beer:thirty.

Thanks again to everybody for all the information. I really do appreciate it.

After 3 hours this is what i got from eclipse.
https://i.imgur.com/LYfEhJv.png


After one hour this is what i got from BTCguild.
https://i.imgur.com/ZlcPwZm.png


BTCguild earned more BTC in less time and my earnings were available immediately. Its been 4 hours since i started mining with eclipse and my BTC is still not available.

Thanks to all - this is all fascinating info!

Quick question, does the hashing power of your setup affect which pool you should join? I will be bringing my 500GHs BFL mini rig online on Friday, and so it's a little more important to maximize efficiency vs my lil' 10.9 GHs ASICminer Blade right now! I'm on Slush's pool at this time.

Thanks folks.

If you have the hardware to run a p2pool node, and the 30 second share time switchover has occurred by Friday you should consider that.  The switch will happen when 95% of hashpower is on the new version.  We are currently at 67%.

P2Pool can actually get you more coin than solo mining if you set it up correctly.  See here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153232.0

The same criteria as your blade.  Look for these

Stratum
Variable Difficulty
Reliability

Not a big deal now but will be in the future

Pay Transaction Reward.

Those are the things you should be looking for in a pool.  As always setup failover pools, always have a plan b and c at least.

If you have "a few" Avalons and more on the way, don't you have enough hashing power to mine on your own?

Solo mining with that hash rate is no trivial task.

Pointing that hash rate at a pool(s) is trivial.

How come? If he's got four Avalons he's going to find two blocks per week on average right now. The difficulty could quadruple and he would find a block every other week. Just point, click, done. No fees, no special software to keep updated (except a regular client to mine against), couldn't be easier.

Because you can't point that much hashing power at your Bitcoin-QT client.  You need to setup your own private pool server.  That's above some of our heads, definitely mine. :)
Sam

Why is that? Sounds incredible.

You need some lighter weight software to proxy for you.  If you don't have a proxy to throw away most of the results, you will keep bitcoind too busy to do the other things it needs to do.

The Bitcoin clients were initially designed to work with CPU mining which was fairly low burden on the client.  But now we have exponentially increased the hashing power with high end GPU's, GPU clusters and now ASIC's and the Bitcoin clients don't/can't scale with that load.

That is one of the main reasons for pools.  Pool Operators have gone through the trouble/cost of developing high performance Bitcoind's and pool server software which is very vertical market type software to keep up with the load and they often have had trouble with the ASIC loads.

So if you want to solo mine with high end ASIC's download some pool software and set it up.  I don't have time for that.

Good Luck with it.
Sam

Not only that, but the bitcoin developers have tried to distance themselves from mining entirely, not adopting the efficient forms of the high performance mining protocols that have evolved around high mining hash rate speeds, instead dissociating the work of mining to others (indirectly pools). While this may seem crazy, it is also indirectly accepting that it is virtually impossible for solo mining to make any sort of reasonable sense any more. I lament this fact, for I still think that all miners should have solo mining as their final backup should all pools fail, as a way to guarantee the bitcoin network remains secure, if not necessarily smoothly/consistently profitable for its miners.

Hmm... it's almost like we need a distributed way of breaking up block rewards.

Oh wait, that's p2pool.

Indeed, though it's still not quite ASIC ready, but getting there.

Please don't make blanket statements like that.  People keep repeating them and using you as a source.

Several ASICs do have problems with p2pool, but others do not.  For example, I am mining with 20GH/s of AM USB just fine on p2pool.  With the new 30 second share time, there have been some reports of BFL hardware reaching p2pool efficiency over 100%.

I thought I was the source........ :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

Fine, it's ASIC ready up to a point, just not Avalon ready, though gmaxwell tells me some newer patches may have finally nailed it.

Too much weight is put on the efficiency value from p2pool on its own. On an Avalon I could get 100% efficiency... but at an effective hashrate of 6GH when the device was supposed to be hashing at 80GH.

Thank you.  And now that the "avalon fix" for p2pool is released, does it solve the issue in your opinion?

What is rejects/stale/dupe/other on BTCguild dashboard?

Those are the shares that you submit that get rejected for those reasons.

Stale is work submitted for previous blocks or possibly after a certain timeout, Dupe is duplicate work and Other are rejects that don't fall into the first two categories.

I'm a fan of P2Pool.  I run a P2Pool node, feel free to connect to it, information is in my signature! :)

Do all those rejects count as paid orphans?

No, your not paid for rejects, because they were rejected.

Orphans are when a block is found that is not part of the main blockchain and would create a forked chain if they were to be continued to be mined on.  This is cause, I think, mainly when two pools find a solution to the same block in a very close time frame.  Only one can be the real block solver and the other one is orphaned.
Sam

OK, im gonna hit 1500GH this weekend. Im thinking about pools again. I like BTCguild. Admin seems cool. Never have any problems with the pool. But my 24 hour earnings is always a few coins less than what mining calculators are estimating. Forgive me if im asking the same questions again but with the difficulty rising i want to make sure im maximizing my return.

DGM vs PPLNS. I know there is a brief explanation in the sticky. I still dont get it. I know DGM is newer. Newer isnt always better but it usually is. I would like to get some opinions. Which method should i go with and why?

Pool size. Im assuming larger pool means more blocks solved and more BTC. Just want to confirm if this is an accurate assumption. Im assuming it is and thats why BTCguild is the largest pool.

I noticed giga is offering a semi-private pool with 0% fee for people with 200GH. Obviously, 0% vs 3% is better. But what im really wondering is if BTCguild size pay TX reward and orphans will earn more than the 3% fee.

Solo mining. I hear if you solve a block yourself you get 25 coins per block. This sounds nice. Im wondering if my hashing power is enough to justify solo mining or if i should stick with a pool.

Thanks for help.

Not quite. Both methods proposed approximately at the same time. PPLNS just widely used. In the long term both methods give you the same amount of bitcoins.

Not quite. More blocks, but your reward from each block is smaller.
You may get some extra coins (less than 0.5%) from transactions fee, but this extra income may devalued due bad uptime for big pools (due overload or DDOS).

Orphans usually around 1%, current income from TX fee usually also minuscule.

Think about solo as about gambling. You may solve block even on one CPU, but this is very unlikely with current difficulty.
With 1.5TH you have a good chance solve several blocks, but there is no warranty what your income would be bigger than from pool.

@WebSlicer point your devices  at several different pools for a week or two to get a representative sample of pool payouts . I guess you could use a spreadsheet if you really want to be pedantic.

If you have, or better if I had, 1.5 TH/s I'd go solo, it takes some work to set it up correctly, though.

spiccioli

ps. As you may already know my second choice would be HHTT :)

Solo mining?

Pick a pool, any pool. mine for two weeks. Look at how many blocks you found. compare your return for those blocks if your were solo (most likely 0) against how much you made in the pool. go with which ever mode you would make the most money.

With solo mining @ 1.5 TH and current difficulty, you would average slightly less than a block a day (24.1345 BTC/day).  You would have to be tremendously unlucky to find 0 blocks in two weeks.

Oh sure, confuse things with the facts. actually, the suggestion i made was still valid, just not the outcome i expected. :P