Bitcoin Forum

 What's better for 24/7 mining?

That subject has been discussed to death so many times it's not even funny.
The search function doesn't hurt.

If not for pool hoppers, there should be no difference in the long run.
However, on traditional prop pools the hoppers will take advantage of your steady work thus lowering your profitability.
PPS, SMPPS, DGM, and PPLNS payout schemes are immune to hopping.
Find a pool with low fees and preferably low invalid/reject count.

Give BitMinter or Eligius a try, they are both 0% fee.

 Thanks for the answer. I'm using deepbit so far and have 1.63% rejected out of 13436 shares. Should be good? I'll check if I'll have better income with BitMinter and Eligius.

I don't recommend you use Deepbit.
However good/stable they are, they can't possibly make up for the 10% fee they charge the PPS-mode miners.

Eligius is a SMPPS pool, therefore you will get very steady payouts - every single share you send will be paid for.
While Deepbit pays you 0.00003597 BTC per share, current reward on Eligius is 0.00003997 BTC.
How about you underclock your GPUs by 10%? No? Didn't think so. Then why stick with high fee pools?

I'm currently mining at Bitminter and have only 0.13% rejected shares. That should put your 1.63% in perspective.
Using BitMinter, you have to get ready for some variance. There can be days when no block is found and you get nothing.
That shouldn't matter, however, as over time expected revenues from both Eligius and BitMinter converge on the same value.

I use Deepbit's proportional mode, lesser fee and higher profit over time than deepbit's/btcguild's PPS.

What about classic proportional mode nowadays on other pools, it isn't that good anymore because of pool hoppers? And gives lesser profit overall than PPLNS and SMPPS?

Good for you but still that's 3% fee for the most primitive, proportional payout scheme.

You'll be a sheep the pool hoppers thrive on. If that doesn't bother you, be my guest.
As I said SMPPS, PPLNS, PPS, and DGM payout schemes were invented with the explicit purpose of being immune to pool hopping.

No payout scheme should influence your revenue in any way. Some being more variance than others but all the differences average out over time.
The only things which really matter are pool fees and stale share percentage.

Some pools introduce fancy features to lure users: Triplemining has a 1 BTC jackpot every week. The only problem is, being one of the pool's 130+ active users there is no reason you should expect to win the jackpot this year. As I said, it's more of a lure than a tangible advantage.

Seriously stop using deepbit :-\

No. Deepbit is awesome. It is the biggest pool for a reason.

They should do a 51% attack to wake up the folks thinking "don't fix the 51% vulnerability because it will not happen anyway".

Pools will be the death of us all... and I regard Deepbit as the Mordor of all pools - can't expect anything good with all that amassed hash power.

The only reason I see is clueless newbies thinking a big pool has to be a good pool.
Its insanely expensive, and if you use proportional payout like the OP, you are giving at least 20% of your revenue to pool hoppers.

I can see why pool hoppers love it though.

 I've tried bitminter's 12 hours run yesterday and earned 0.228347831 BTC!!! Holy shit! At average I should get 0.09 BTC for 12h with my 221 mhash/s. Maybe it was a lucky day. But most of them are unconfirmed so far until full block will be confimed I suppose.

That was quite a lucky day, congrats. Just don't expect the pool to keep this level of luck indefinitely.
On BitMinter homepage, click Statistics -> Blocks to see how many more blocks you have to wait for your payout.
Once a block reaches 2 or 3 confirmations, there is very little chance of it becoming orphaned.
A block is considered fully matured when it reaches 120 confirmations.

 On lucky days you may get 3-4x your average. On unlucky days you will get nothing. Thats not whats important, since it evens out, more important is that on average you will gain a fair amount more because of lower fees (well, none really) and you dont pay for the poolhoppers. And just as importantly, by joining a small pool, you help keep the bitcoin network more secure.

As for unconfirmed, thats with any pool. As mentioned above, blocks only mature after 120 confirmations. Thats a bitcoin thing, nothing to do with the pool. Its possible a block will be orphaned, but extremely unlikely, and near impossible after a few confirmations. I dont think bitminter has had more than a single orphaned BTC block so far. Maybe even none, not sure.

btw, there are a few pools that are offering 105/110% PPS
So basically they are paying you 5%/10% to mine, rather than taking a 5/10% fee
I am mining on p2pool. mostly because i like the idea
there is also btcserv that pays pps and takes no fees