Bitcoin Forum

Most miners have their reasons for going with one or another (fees, score, ddos security, pool hopping...) anyone with any expedience with all three with any thoughts why they landed on their own?

I prefer DeepBit simply for the web-UI.  The fees are negligible and it's worth it to me to be able to have a quick reference to a BTC per 24hr stat.

Used all three and others.

I am getting more btc per hour with slush.

Look at this - http://eligius.st/~luke-jr/samples/800MH/
from - http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20689.0

All good pools (and that's why they're top 3)

In short term, whether you get more BTC from one pool than another is luck.

Commission wise, deepbit is most expensive one but it has the lowest stale rate (<1%), so that evens out the additional fees.

It's a matter of personal taste. I like deepbit, espeically the red status text if a miner is idle for more than the customized number of minutes (I don't like its delayed stats but I understand it's done to prevent pool hopping).

My experience has been...

Deepbit site features are very nice. BTC Guild site features are also excellent.

Slush's pool is nice and steady with a good interface but maybe not as nice (for what I like) than the other two.

Stales are definitely lowest at Deepbit.

Reliability for me has been highest with Deepbit and Slush, but still experimenting.

I really like how you can set the timeout threshold for your workers at DeepBit.  At other pools, like MtRed for instance, you'd have to wait up to 5 minutes before you know whether a worker is offline or not.  With DeepBit you can know that info in as little as 1 minute.

I had about 0,3% stales on deepbit, now 0,1% on btcguild. 0,5% less "fees" for same features PLUS e-mail idle notification.

So using btcguild is really a no-brainer.

(I'm using deepbit as backup)

I have my rigs setup as priority as follows:

1. btcguild
2. deepbit
3. slush

If the primary pool is down or has any issues the miners will move to the next one down the list. Hard to believe, but I have actually had the miners go to slush after the others had issues. In regard to payout, BTCguild and Deepbit seem to be better than Slush only because Slush has had some really crappy connectivity issues for me.

reliability : btcmine
variance : eligius

combine the two and you get one awesome pool :< with bigger pools you sometimes run into problems like downtime, high stale% etc.

btcguild as my main since you can pick what fees you pay and they payout everything in your account instead of rounding it to 0.01
deepbit is my backup

I too mine all 3, although I actually mine all 3 equally, this for me is a way of reducing the already reduced variance even further. The top 3 hold around 80% of the networks total hashing power, therefore it is very unlikely that all 3 will be running a streak of badluck simultaneously. More likely that if any one or two are running badly the other one or two will be running well. And it still functions the same as having backup pools because if one goes down the other two just kick up.

I happen to like all 3 pools, they have nice webUIs and reporting (slush is probably my least favorite though as I can't see my actual hashrate the pool sees, but c'est la vie). I worry a bit about the security of the blockchain, but for now things seem ok, so I'll just keep my eyes open.

Just to clarify - the good/bad luck does not compensate for the whole network (100%). There can be bad luck for all miners, or good luck for all, too. Its just a LUCK, nothing more (or less). The variance is lower, but you can still get pretty bad luck.

I prefer deepbit, I've used slush and did not like how they calculate payouts.... no way ever should you get nothing for the shares you've submitted, a share is a share.

Jon

I'm also on Deepbit and find the variance to be minimal. BTC Guild seems like a good alternative despite some variance and downtime horror stories I have heard.