Bitcoin Forum

I have recently joined btcmine, but was wondering out of all these pooled mining services which is the best one ?
btcmine,deepbit or mining.bitcoin.cz ?

There are currently 3 services in public domain or more ?

Actually the best pooled mining is not one of those - it's http://BitcoinPool.com :)

They have no fees, they're the only mining service that provides efficiency ratio calculations, and their modded version of the poclbm miner is the most efficient.  They are currently in beta, but are doing an awesome job.

DeepBit is the best, of course, and the most efficient.
DeepBit supports long polling, instant payments, hot spare server, no need to wait for confirmation, no invalid blocks.

The best one is the one that is having the best luck .... pool hopping is discouraged with the "devaluing shares" scoring systems though.

Deepbit is very easy to set-up with, and has the most features and most info. Bitcoinpool has almost no features and have been victim of a few attacks, and they stored the passwords IN PLAIN TEXT, they also forgot to pay someone already, which is a little suspicious.

i vote for deepbit. the pool with more features and less problems so far :)

Oh god, plain text? oO

Is better Mac or Linux?

Somebody prefer instant payouts, somebody prefer score system, somebody prefer anything else.

Deepbit is prone to pool hopping abuse strategy:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3165.0
which depending on your approach is an advantage or disadvantage :)

Your attack is possible, but the effect is negligible and can be ignored at this moment :)
I'm monitoring this and if i'll notice some considerable hashing power jumping, i'll fix it.

the 1 hour delay in stats help against pool hoping though

Helps but it is far from solving the problem. At worst, you need to hop after any block on the Bitcoin network is found. Based on current speed, you have 25% probability it was deepbit (and 33% if you simultaneously check it was not slush's pool). Such imperfect hopping is enough to gain a few percent. And you can analyze Bitcoin traffic and increase your chance of correctly deciphering deepbit's blocks.

thats a lot of time and energy.... if that time were spent doing useful however  ::)

Mind enumerating? I'm pretty new here but saw in another thread you had some pretty serious gear.

As for original question I've used both slush and deepbit, both have differences but are both reputable so why not give them a try also and just see what you like best? It's hardly a lifelong commitment and the fact it's quick and easy to change yet they have a pretty even share each should probably tell you it's largely personal preference. Just don't make the mistake of trying to compare one day of earnings on one pool with another, it will vary far too much on the luck of the day for that to be meaningful.

Making some very simple changes to already available open source software to gain ~30% in your expected payments (by cheating) isn't useful (to you, at least)?

so you are going to sit all day in front of your computer, monitor the block explorer, and have a 25% chance of correctly poolhopping? Then when you successfully poolhop, it is not even SURE you are getting this 20+% increase? (no actual long-term data of it working, I'm not talking theoretically here). So all this for a 5-7% POTENTIAL increase?

Nster, you don't know what you're talking about. Even a 5-7% increase is worth the time of some individuals, and that's all it takes. Never mind that the process could most likely be partially or fully automated.

It wouldn't be worth my time, so i say he was right  :P

That's a theoretical increase, there is no actually hands-on proof. In reality, it may be anything between -5% to 5%.

Also, if you pool hop every block, you are losing maybe 1% of the miners time during these hops on top of that. and so far there are no automated processes, so right now you are losing your whole freakin day for a <5% increase. an hour of work is 15$ net (20$ brute) for me, or over 11 BTC. even if you assume 5% increase, which is really the best you could get, it would take 20Gh/s to BREAK EVEN with 1 hour of work per day. Even if you make this automated process in 1 hour, it would take 40 days to BREAK EVEN with 500Mh/s. This is considering the best circumstances and if the pool hoping works in practice

I just looked at that site and they seem to have a serious problem with hackers (crackers is actually the correct term).  I wouldn't recommend them for this reason, at least, not until we know their admin can secure their servers (forum shows that they were storing passwords in plain text on the server which means once somebody got in, they got a hold of a lot.  Also looks like some people lost a weeks work or more.

My vote is for either deepbit.net or slush (minning.bitcoin.cz).  I may bring up a second machine machine soon and point my two machines at one pool each [although I am not sure that is wise ... seems like I might solve more blocks sticking to one pool].

[citation needed]

That's what programs are for.

Old info. They have salted MD5 passwords in place now. They have added "hundred of lines of lines of code to deter SQL injection". And the people who didn't get paid was because their software wasn't detecting invalid blocks properly. It says Beta on the front page for a reason.

The fact that they did that, AND they forgot to pay someone etc etc just makes them incompetent and untrustworthy

I started learning about bitcoin a few days ago so I'm still a noob and have much more to understand. But I'm trying to choose a pool for my new HD5850 and just wanted to get some clarification from the people that have been around here a bit longer. It seems to me that as of now slush's pool and deepbit are the two main pools used by the community. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is the cost of being in the different pools available. I was at first drawn to bitcoinpool because they don't charge any fees but decided against it after seeing that they have been hacked a few times. Looking at the slush pool it apears that he takes 2% off the top for expenses and the rest goes to the miners. Deepbit appears to take either 3% off the top or 10% off the top if you want the pay per share payouts. So do I have that correct as far as fees are concerned? To be honest 10% seems pretty brutal to be part of a pool. Are the features that deepbit offers to the miners worth an extra 8% over what you get at slush's pool? Please note I'm not trying to offend anyone, start a flame war, or troll etc, I'm just trying to get the most straightforward answer. So what am I missing here guys? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

You missed this:

1) 10% commission used only for PPS payout, due all mining risks take pool operator.
    Because you get money for every submitted shares.
    In this mode doesn't matter solve pool block or not, you always get a steady and predicted profit.
    If you serious about 24/7 mining for months this payout mode less profitably for you.
2) Another pool with 2% commission BTCMine (http://btcmine.com)

The extra 1% is like an insurance against failed blocks (some other pools had up to 8% of those, but in deepbit you'll get your reward even if the block fails).

10% "fee" is only for special Pay-Per-Share mode, when you are insured agains any risks and bad luck.

Thank you very much for the explanation Tycho, definitely makes things more clear. Looks like deepbit is getting the first 5850 and slush will get the second. Figured mining two seperate pools might reduce variance a bit since those two pools cover almost half of all network mining. Thanks again.

My citation is postings on their forum which I read.  Go look for yourself.

So, not a citation then.

The citation is bitcoinpool's owners own statements on their own forums.

I don't believe we've [BitcoinPool] "forgotten" to pay anyone. We had a few instances while running our pool that caused payments to be delayed or corrected manually, but we've never "forgot" to pay anyone.

Our passwords are MD5 hashed. We have plenty of features and really, there isn't a whole lot else to add aside from cosmetic or aesthetic additions and some reporting.

We were at one point being heavily attacked and have since plugged every hole in our security that we've discovered or had reported to us.

We charge 0% fees. We support long polling. We host our own forum for discussion about our pool. We're updating, optimizing and improving on a daily basis, and considering the number of users on our pool, and the speed of the pool in comparison to others, we're doing a damned good job at being a worthwhile pool.

Aaah, and here I am thinking that a citation is a link or clear reference to something the reader can lookup themselves, not a statement that may or may not exist somewhere with no guidance on how to find it. I guess I don't need to bother posting links to evidential information any more.

To be fair, I didn't "cite" anything.  I simply reiterated what I read.  You can just as easily go over there and read what I read.  If you want to discredit my statement because you are too lazy to look; fine with me.  But there were countless threads and posts about the issues and it is not at all hard to find on their site.  The forum is open for viewing.

An interesting pool that I will keep my eye on, but frankly, I am happy with deepbit at the moment.  Slush would be good as well if long polling was implemented :)  I have little doubt that it will be.  How can this other pool manage with 0% fees anyway?