Bitcoin Forum

Hi all,

Long time lurker, new poster. There's a large amount of information here and as someone new to mining it's challenging to synthesize.

I'll be bringing online 200th start of January and curious to see *first-hand* pool recommendations. I appreciate with the halving next year a pplns pool may not be the best given the time to ramp up. Ideally, a pool that pays tx fees would be great.

I know there's a lot of experienced miners out there so any recommendations would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance!

well ill chime in.....

i like mining on ViaBTC or slush for PPLNS, or Novablock for PPS+, although i mainly use the PPS+ pools as my roll over backups.

Slush pays transaction fees, and so does ViaBTC, but VIABTC also merge mines a few shitcoins at the same time......

anyway, do your research, keep asking questions etc.....

EDIT: i should add, i havent mined on Slushpool recently as they have had terrible luck, and like you said, with the halving coming, we need to accumulate as much as possible.,

okay. of the following two styles of pools pps+ always pays never fails to pay. fees should be a bit higher.

pplns only pays when you hit a block. fees should be a bit lower

so lets say you are on a pplns pool and it is ramped up to 1n or 2n or 3n or 4n or even 5n,


if you leave that pool the day after the 1/2 ing you ramp down.

may take 1 or more days to ramp down to zero.

so you leave a pplns pool move to a pps+ pool

and you collect from both pools for 1 or 2 or more days.

until your pplns pool drops to zero..


so. right before the 1/2 ing and right after the 1/2 a lot of people move off pplns pools and on to pps+ pools.

What about Antpool? They are not good option?

No, they are not a good option.  For many reasons already enumerated in various threads here!

Hmm, ok. Antpool fee for pplns is 0%. That is reason why i chose them. Maybe I will try slush pool to compare profit.

Antpoo PPLNS is 0% fees, but no Transaction fees are paid to miners.

Transaction fees can be as small as nothing, but can be more than 1 or 2 BTC on top of the 12.5BTC reward.

They are preying on the fact that most people don't understand how bitcoin works.
That 0% fee is a lie.

Each block found on the bitcoin network is (currently) 12.5 BTC + transaction fees.
Other PPLNS pools charge a % fee based on the 12.5+transactions in the blocks found.

Antpoo keep all the transaction fees - so yes that is a fee they are charging the miners.

So e.g. over the past 6 months, the average transactions in a block has been about 4% extra or about 13 BTC total instead of 12.5
So they've kept, on average, about 0.5 BTC in fees per PPLNS block.
So, clearly NOT 0% fees.

Though, nothing surprising about Antpoo doing this.

Thanks for this information.

Notice they don't tell you what YOUR portion of the transaction fee reward would be...

To calculate that you must take your portion/% of the total hash rate of the pool.

you would have got THAT % of the tx reward...and that would be VERY VERY SMALL.

The amount of transaction fees per block may have been 4% over the last 6 months but in the last couple of months, it has been less than 2%. So antpool may actually the best bet now if getting the most reward before the halving is top priority. The issue is that if enough people are mining on pools that don't pay transaction fees, it makes it possible for the pools to send spam transactions to artificially increase the transaction fees. Bad news for the network. Also, just normal market conditions can cause the transaction fees to rise. So between now and the halving, it would be best to find a PPLNS pool with enough hashrate for a short rampup that pays transaction fees. After halving, ramp up time and pool hashrate is only important if you can't deal with the variance.

I am using Nicehash for my 2 - S9's and 1 - V9.  It was easy to get started and my feet wet.  I know they are not a traditional mining pool, but I have also read reviews that highlight how Nicehash pays more.  Thoughts?  Was looking at Slushpool or CKPool as other alternatives.

Thank you.

Not a fan of slushpool

ckpool  is small block times  are long waits.

if you can afford to wait a long time for a block  you could use ckpool

Could please anyone explain the reason of using Poolin (4% fees) in case there are many pools with lower fees (Slush 2%, F2Pool 2.5%, etc.)?


What terms of mining does ViaBTC have? I don't see this pool here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools, though there market share ~6%.

Yea. Unfortunately that site is super handy, but hasn’t been updated in a while.

https://pool.viabtc.com/pricing

What do you think about the performance of different pools? I.e. could the luck be different depends on the backend of the pool? In this case the quality of dashboard and even pool's fees are not so important if your luck is better then others because of pool's performance.

Luck should average around 100%

Luck does not 'correct' itself, it simply approaches 100%
e.g. if your luck was 80%, it would approach 100% by being 100% for the long term future

A pool can't make it go higher without giving away BTC to make it appear higher, but yes problems with their code and their bitcoin network connectivity can make it lower.
It can be higher or lower, of course due to luck, but that is just an historical observation, not an expected future result.
The expected future result should be 100% (less orphans)

Code 'problems' of course include trying to rip off their miners.

A simple example would be slush.
They supply a 'proof' set of data, that they claim proves they are doing the right thing.
Alas, that 'proof' doesn't prove the pool hash rate, it proves a lower limit on the pool hash rate.
Which leads to the obvious issues that can allow.

im on nova block  ;D

https://novablock.com/

more of a usa based pool & i like smaller pool / more decentralization & not a fan of the china big poolz , poolin, btc.com, antpoo, f2, ect,

rewards: https://support.novablock.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027197853-What-is-Rewarding-System-

With the change in ramp up from 5Nd to 3 days - I would suggest kano.is - especially with a .9% fee, one of the lowest out there. Not to mention the block reward bonus he is paying, .1 BTC for the next 18 or 19 blocks until halving.

KanoPool mined 2 blocks in the past 4 months, how is this pool going to mine 18 or 19 blocks until the halving?

true, only 2 blocks but that was also when the ramp up was 5Nd - it is now simply 3 days. With the 5Nd there was less attraction for new miners due to the long ramp time. The pool has gained I think 5 or 6 PH since the 3 day ramp change - though no blocks as of yet.

but as with any pplns pool, the rewards may come less frequently but will be significantly higher in value.

as for the 18 or 19 blocks or until halving statement - that was based on Kano several months ago where he stated he would pay .1 btc bonus to block finders for the next 20 blocks or until halving - whichever came first.

I would say he was trying to encourage miners to join the pool.

Only way is by the 0.1BTC block finder bounty attracting a few very large farms - which is the whole point of the bounty and change in ramp time...
No matter what, anyone who finds a block before the halving gets the bounty.

he needed to do the three day ramp up. as 5n can be exploited at 1/2 ing time.

Just leave pool with 1 month to 1/2 ing.  your ramp will not vanish for 5n which with 23ph is about four or five months.

His changing to 3 days has prevented this exploit.

Smart move on his part.

I wish the pool a good hot streak. Maybe four blocks in four weeks would be very good for a 23ph pool.

True. But only time will tell. With the change in ramp up time from nearly three months, down to 3 days.... paired with low fees..... it could attract more hashpower to get high enough for the block finders reward to utilise them all.

Indeed, it would only take some whale miners to move their PETA/EXA hashrate to easily make this happen. But something else is amiss as they refuse stubbornly to do so.

That bonus seems more attractive to small miners, the big miner is more meh to the proposed amount. Of course the largest miners have more lottery tickets (hashrate) but one can always pray to luck. Its still better than solo mining.