Bitcoin Forum

I mine CN coins since 1 year ago, I tryed many pools and many coins. I like the privacy of CN coins. I like that the energy consumption is the lowest with CN coins. I like that there are great projects using cryptonight pow.
I want to draw attention to beginners and old dogs alike to 2 great pools that are not so well known/ used by miners, and they deserv much much more attention...
"https://www.hashvault.pro/" and "https://miner.rocks/"

Also, the best pool list I found for Monero and other coins:
"https://miningpoolstats.stream/"

What I like about Hashvault.pro
-great pool design;
-great interface (some pools copied it ;));
-full support for many CN coins;
-free nodes for lite wallet clients!!! (that's why I said "full support" and that's why I give them 5 stars);
-great support team;
-international stable servers;
-small fees;
-low minimum payment limits.
-PPLNS.
-mobile friendly dashboards and monitoring apps (Blockwatch, etc.)
They have variable difficulty on all ports and coins, because when Monero and Sumo made their antiASIC forks in spring of 2018, I think they suffered DDoS attacks with low diff shares that blocked their servers for a while. Since than I never saw fix diff on their pools. I am a fan of fix diff, but variable diff gives you aprox. the same rewards on the long run.

What I like about Miner.Rocks:
-international stable servers, small fees, low minimum payment limits and all that stuff that makes a pool run smooth and stable.
-many many statistics that you don't see in other pools.
-reward calculator for all supported cn coins in 1 big table on the first page!!! (great stuff).
-they supported some coins since their day 1 of the main net and before that, on test net (great thing for new coins).
-dark interface ;D (love that)
One other GREAT thing at Miner.Rocks that very few knows about... Monero mining with PPS reward system and 0,9% fee!!!
For who dosen't know why this is so great: PPS is the fairest and stable reward system. Your reward as a miner depends only of the entire network's difficulty; if all the pools for a coin offered a PPS reward system, than it wouldn't count on what pool you've been mining; you would get the same reward. PPS dosen't care about what blocks are found by the pool, dosen't care about luck, dosen't care about other miners geting in and out from the pool. For miners PPS is THE REWARD SYSTEM! All the problems goes to pool... it must find enough blocks to support the payments. That's why when you see PPS, you also see pool fee 2/3/5% (bigger than at PPLNS pools (<1%)). And here comes Miner.Rocks with pool fee 0,9% and PPS! WTF?!?! :o 5 STARS MINER.ROCKS! :-*

In my mining quest, I found good pools and bad pools, great interfaces and awful ones, popular pools with big hashrates and a big lack of interest from the admins to improve the frontend, and small pools with small hashrates, but with top designs and interfaces, with great statistics, with fair rewards and cheap fees. Don't stop at the biggest MF in the block, just because many others stopped there. Try all the pools for the coin you're interested in. You would be surprised!

As a small PS: The rewards for these 2 pools are correct, I can guarantee that rewards are exactly what they must be, and the shares shown are correct. They don't cheat!
Recently, I stumbled upon a cheater... I heard that some pools cheat, but never had the "pleasure" to meet one... untill recently, when I gave it a try to X-cash project and mined a few coins, for 2 weeks or so. I browsed through all the pools available, and selected hashvault.pro (one of my favs) and xcash.steadyhash.org. After mining a few days on each with the same rig, same OC settings etc., my rewards where aprox. 125000 coins/day at hashvault (exactely what the reward calculator said, and what it was supposed to be according to my calculations based on my hashrate, network and pool hashrate, block reward), but on xcash.steadyhash.org, my rewards where halfened, paying me aprox 63000 coins/day. You can make any excuse you can think of (too many miners, pool not so lucky at that time, etc etc)... I am certain that xcash.steadyhash.org cheats miners!
As an example: I mined Loki since day 1. Miner.rocks in the beginning had aprox.90% of the global hashrate. loki.fairpool.xyz had 5-10%. I mined on both pools. The rewards where aprox the same for many days. And this is true in general. No matter what hashrate a pool has, you get aprox the same rewards in the long run, for the same payment system. So xcash.steadyhash.org, even it was the biggest pool for xcash (biggest=biggest hashrate), it had no excuses to give me half of the proper rewards. Shame on you steadyhash.org!

Thanks for sharing, You can use fixed diff on all https://HashVault.pro pools now. we did turn it off for a while during an ongoing attack, but we implemented a lot of custom code since then which fixed the issues you mentioned.