Bitcoin Forum

 ??? Hi All I'm totally new to world of BTC, yes I know I'm late to the party but there's no time like the present. I've received my first machine the Antminer S1 and now have it up and running, What is the best pool to get my workers on? I'm based in the UK if that makes any difference to the choice. Thanks for your help and you'll probably get a lot more questions from me.

i'm using ghash.io, it's simple, stable and with low fees.

If you are interested in cloud mining I would advise you  lynx-mining.com - it offers  $1-2 per GH/s

How would this compare to BTC Guild?

Try nastyfans.org:9332

0% fees and it's a p2pool node which means you're helping decentralize the network and you don't need to sign up for an account.  You can view your stats by finding your address on the charts link here: http://nastyfans.org:9332

Just aim your miner at nastyfans.org:9332 and use your Bitcoin address as your username with anything for a password.

Eligius http://eligius.st/~gateway/
or BTC Guild https://www.btcguild.com/

BTC Guild has been more stable with less issues and charges 3%
Eligius has no fee but more issues

Been trying out BTC Guild and GHash...

48 hours ea running 1 Ant S1 running 393mhz (~200GH/s)

BTC Guild:  0.03195498
Ghash.io:      0.05393532

Both were very simple to configure in my ant (just put address and worker name basically).

I am pretty much just playing around with 1 ant... Will probably switch it over a few more times to see if averaging will even things out like it should.

EDIT: I know not a good scientific test, since it would be best to have 2 identical sets of hardware mining the different pools during the same specific time windows... but I only have 1 ant...  (if someone wants to send me another I would be happy to run and posts results:) lol)

I have to agree with the recommendation for p2pool above. Generally you'll do better over time and promote decentralization.

Use that pool. >>>----->  :o

Even during the same time period there is random variation between the pools. Each pool finds its own blocks, so one day one pool will make more and the next day another pool will make more.

I reiterate the recommendation for using a p2pool node such as nastyfans. You will have more variance in your mining from day to day but over a period of a few weeks it will even out and you will be helping bitcoin stay decentralized. P2pool has been struggling lately because people don't understand it and needs your help to grow.

p2pool!


The best way! And you can see the coins mature in your wallet :)


That's the beauty of mining :)


Also one more advice try to find a p2pool with a bigger hashpower ;)

Not really, all the p2pool nodes share the same hashpower. But if you are going to use a public node I do recommend you choose one that is well-maintained with an experienced operator or organization supporting it (such as the nastyfans node). Another factor would be choosing a node close to you since this will reduce your local DOA rate a little, but that is secondary to the node being well run.

Also you might want to read this!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=504700.msg5559407#msg5559407


you can win 1 hour of 1.7TH/s  because the want to promote p2pool :D

And I think they had a pretty good idea with the extra power

I also run a (0% fee) p2pool node at http://blisterpool.com

Until the end of march, I'm paying out a bonus of 60 dvc per GH/s per day. All you need to do is register your btc address and dvc address pair on the main page and start mining with your bitcoin address. Couldn't be simpler.

And p2pool is important for bitcoin - helps keep it decentralized so putting hash power towards that goal makes sense.  ;-)

In what way can i choose the best Poll? Is there any guideline?

There is no "best pool", only opinions.

True. Some things to look for: Low fees, reliable, benefits bitcoin, secure so their wallet isn't hacked.

If for whatever reason you don't use p2pool, check out bitparking.com. It's a quality smaller pool that could use more hash power and supports merge mining.

BTCGuild seems to be the most stable pool. Yes it has fees but you'll probably make up the difference because of the uptime.  In my opinion, no one gets close to matching BTCG's customer support.

Eligius is good too.  No fees but you're a worthless mooch if you don't tip at least 1%.  I'm not a big fan of the stats though and payouts are often slow because of bugs in their payout system.  You'll get paid but sometimes they run waaaay behind.

GHash.io is a monster and controls a huge percentage of the network hashrate.  No fees and you don't have to feel guilty about it since they make a fudge-load of money from selling hashing power.  It does seem like they have a bit of downtime nearly everyday though.

I split my hash between all three... roughly 1/3 each.  It reduces variance because combined they represent over 50% of the network hashrate.  I like the thought of getting a piece of 50%+ of every blocked generated.  :D

Oh come on, don't suggest people use the 2 largest pools in the world. :)

If you have some serious hash power the variance will kill you in the small pools.  And most of the big pools (BTCG and Eligius) are big for a reason... they're the best.

GHash is a different story though and I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't think it made financial sense at least in the short term.  And they are facing some serious competition from massive private pools so they won't be a threat for much longer.

Splitting hash is a good idea if you want to reduce variance but also help decentralization using p2pool or at least smaller pools. I set up a mining farm for a friend with some hash on p2pool and some on eligius. If there were a need to further reduce variance, I would add ghash. I would avoid the pools with fees as it is not necessary to pay fees for good pools in the current market.

Question: Does a large pool have any advantage over a smaller pool (or a single person with a block erupter) for finding the next block?

Reason I am asking is this: If a large pool has found the last block, they know this before anyone else, and can start working on the next block. Meantime the guy with the BE does not know this and is whacking away on an invalid block. Small advantage, but with blocks being generated every 10 minutes it could add up.

Or is this totally wrong?

C

lightfoot, the problem of withholding blocks is that if someone else finds a block before you submit it to the network, yours can get orphaned and then you are left with nothing. Risking 25 BTC to try and get a 'head start' on another block wouldn't seem to make sense. And it's all random anyway, partial work means nothing. Your odds of finding a 2nd block are the same whether you report the prior block or hold on to it. I think all you do is hurt yourself.

With 2 antminer S1's I've used Slush's, Eligius, BTCguild - BTC & Eligius give a very consistent payout, however I've found Slush's pool to give out the same payment but more often than not a little bit more. I think it's all down to share of the pool, obviously with a smaller pool you get a little bit more of the share.

Which are the best pools?

All of them.

It's called selfish mining and some guys from Cornell (I think) did a paper on it. You can come out ahead if you are 33% of the network.

Yeah, also another reason why p2pool nodes need more love. 33% is very close to 50%

Ok, I don't want to be a chump (did that with Catcoin) but I wouldn't mind throwing a few hundred gh somewhere. What's a good solid reliable p2p node I can point some stuff at while I sit down and compile the software on my NeXTStation Turbo?

I'll watch the payout for a few days.

C

I'll let others suggest nodes, but I will say you need more than a few days to evaluate p2pool. It is a small pool (about 0.5% of the whole network last I checked) so it only gets a block every day or two. To give it a fair eval you should be willing to wait a few weeks at least. This isn't really any different from other small pools if you have a few hundred GH. If you want to help decentralize things and not run on a huge pool that finds blocks every hour you have to be willing to accept more variance on found blocks.

Variance is fine, as long as the totals even out over a reasonable period of time. Reasonable being the 2 week block retarget period. One thought in my head though is a bad streak of luck now wouldn't be erased by an equally good stream of luck "later" because difficulty keeps creeping up. Does that skew the equations as well?

For example, if I mine a Th at Eclipse then over the past two days I have made .045btc per day due to the crap luck blocks taking 24 and 26 hours to drop. If everything was normal I would get .12btc a day, so I have .09 instead of .24. Now if everything went back to perfect normal but in two weeks I got a string of great luck to cancel out the crappy (say two days of 6 blocks a day), those six blocks would only pay .20 btc so woudl I be out of (heh heh) luck due to the underlying difficulty pop?

Never dull, thinking about this stuff. By converse though a round of good luck now is worth a lot more later. Ug....

C

This is true. Of course it could go the other way. That is, if you get lucky at first and then equally unlucky later. Overall in that case you come out ahead (as you mentioned later).

In reality though, if you are mining for the long term you will be increasing your hash rate over time. If you grow your hash rate at the same rate as the network, equal (good or bad) luck later will balance out with the equal (bad or good) luck earlier.

Keep in mind though, there is no guarantee luck will ever equal out in either direction. Some people are just luckier than others over a lifetime.

Luck lasts a lifetime if you die young.

That's another good point: The problem with being in mining for me is that it's not much of a profitable venture. Actually it is explicitly impossible to make profits (long term profits) in mining because it's a perfectly elastic market or whatnot. That's a part of the reason I haven't jumped to Ants or 28nm or whatever. I'm mostly in it for the fun, learning, and to keep my house warm in the winter. :-)

There is another way to look at luck; bad luck mining could be absorbing other bad things that could be happening in my life. Losing job, kid, car, things like that are serious bad luck. If my mining is a "luck sink" for the bad joss to go to, that's oddly enough ok for me. But that is one of those woo-woo spiritual things, each roll of the dice is independent of ever other roll...

One odd thing about Eligius though: When I mined there in the beginning during the summer/fall last year they had a horrible streak of luck for the few days I was on. I think I had 50% shelved shares and I thought that sucked. So I switched to eclipse, but left eligius as my backup. And over the next few months I realized I got every one of those shares back at the value from September. Oddly enough eligius' payment system seems to transcend the concept of time coupled with difficulty. Which is very, very interesting.

C
C

In that case you should definitely play with p2pool. You shouldn't get clobbered even if you do have some bad luck (or maybe it goes the other way and you get a windfall).


Eligius had very good luck for a while. I'm not sure of the exact timeframe but I remember being at 99%+ on there for quite a while.

 ghash.io is the way to go !

I hope you're kidding. ghash.io has a dangerous amount of network share right now. It is the worst pool you could choose to mine on at the moment.

BTC Guild.  IMHO 8)

Thanks for answers!

Mining at https://directpool.net

Main reasons:

1% pool fee
donations goto funding bitcoin projects
It's PPLNS
and last but not least, website layout is too sexy :D

Ignore the mumbo jumbo religious talk about network sanctity and 51% share and what not. Let Gavin worry about that stuff. You are here to get ROI first, right? ... Before your ASIC goes obsolete with the difficulty jumps. So Ghash.io is the way to go. One of every 3 blocks goes to them plus a short PPLNS means you ramp up quickly and start making money. Add a little on Eligius and volla you get half the blocks.... Best way to make $$$ ... and best of all they don't rip you off like the others with fees. I'd donate a little to Eligius though.

Technically any no fee site will have the same return in the long run. I'm bringing my systems back to 33% Eclipse, 33% Eligus, and 33% P2Pool.

The money should roll in regardless.

C

That is a good plan. If you want absolutely the lowest variance, you should divide your hash rate between pools according to their share of the network. If you want highest expected ROI you should choose the pools with the lowest fee (and payout of transaction fees and/or merge-mined coins) and the lowest risk of getting ripped off (either by the pool or the pool itself getting ripped off). The gold standard for the latter is running your own p2pool node (or solo mining of course).  In reality you probably want something in between, which comes close to the mix described, although I also wouldn't rule out some small share on ghash, say 10-20%.

The best pool fees I've seen is 1%, is there any better rates < 1%?

Eclipse, DGM, nice, lousy luck this week but that's fine.
Eligius: Nice bunch, takes a day to pay out with .04 payout threshold and 300gh going to it.
P2Pool: No fees, you set up.

C

You can change the payout threshold of Eligius using the My Eligius page on their site (although most people who aren't tiny miners seem to set something close to one day).

I haven't tried Eclipse.

What do you think of Bitminter? 1% fee but they pay transaction fees and merge mine NMC, which Eclipse doesn't. Seems like that should come out about the same or maybe a little better.

Also p2pool you don't need to set up if you use someone else's node, although there are certainly some disadvantages to that. There are lots of public nodes with 0% fee.  Partial list here: http://p2pool-nodes.info/

Thanks a lot for making this thread and many thanks to member for their answers, now I think I know which pool I want to join))

The weird part is that even though I bitch a bit about luck on a site like Eclipse I did the math with some spreadsheets and the payouts are right on the money for the Month of March. So it is a fine pool to use, it's just the human tendency to focus on the losses (low luck rounds) and ignore the wins (good luck rounds).

Spreadsheets and bitcoin however do not lie. Fascinating.

C

I'm in the same boat.

Also new to bitcoin mining.  I've invested some cash in a used Jupiter.  I'm not looking to get my money in lightning speed here, but would like to see me recover the cash and make some before things change with the new fast miners hit the ground.

I started with BTC Guild when I had PPS, daily income was about 0.08BTC

After a week, he decided to remove PPS, and so I didn't know what to do.....the PPLNS 24 hours estimate on the site showed 0.065/24H  That was a big drop.
I decided to switch to GHash.  I mined with them for 39 Hours according to my calculations, I made 0.33BTC

Then I was reading all about P2POOL, so I decided to go with one, Elizium.name

I realized that after almost a full day, I had nothing.  Yes, I know that I have to mine for over 24H on P2P to see something, but with difficulty going up..up... and money invested, I would like to see me recover as soon as possible, then play.

So I switched to 50BTC as it's still offering PPS.

But from my calculations, GHash seems to make me more than PPS.

Any thoughts??

PPS has no variance. You always get the same. All the other methods have some variance, which means you get lucky or unlucky. Some days you get more than PPS, some days you get less. That's how it works. If you want no risk and just get absolutely steady income like clockwork you have to use PPS, but you will usually get less that way over time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion