Bitcoin Forum

Deepbit literally asks for 5-8% of your earnings, but with Slush it's only limited to 2%, is it my best bet?

If you take a look at the 'Pool' subforum, you'll see that most of them offer 0% fees.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=41.0

I really don't know why people keep mining at Deepbit since many pools offer very low, even zero fees :/

okay no, i dont care about zero percent taxation, i care about the fees associated AND the total hashrate it already has, i mean it's safe to say that deepbit miners will not have a hard time finding a block at all

With the way most PPS pools work, you don't really need to worry about how often the pool finds a block as I understand it.

why's that, explain

Because PPS = Pay-Per-Share

You are paid a fixed amount for each share you contribute to the pool instead of a proportional amount of each found block. So when blocks are found is not your concern anymore. It could be one per minute or one block every week. You don't have to care about it.

Your payout is steady with PPS compared to proportional, but for that you pay a larger fee/taxation to the pool operator (who has to take more risk as the pool revenue is still based on luck).

With PPS pools, you get paid by the shares you submit, not when the pool finds a block. Those usually come with a small fee as the operator is covering the variance for you. A few pools like Clipse's pool and Coinsauce offer fee-less rates though.

A DGM pool like OZcoin, EMC.. is the best bet for you if you consider multiple issues. The total hashrate of the pool is irrelevant in the payout - the more isn't considered as the best. The variance is low, and they usually don't charge a fee. The payout is slow at first but slowly builds up to be constant later on.

Less fee doesn't necessarily mean the best, don't get tempted by 0% fee.
With proportional pools, sometimes you'll get less BTC day 1-3, sometimes you'll get big on day 4, etc.
With PPS pools, your earnings will be constant.
I started on Slush and move to BTCGuild (PPS with 5% fee) because it offers steady payout rate.

My advice is, since sometimes a pool is DDOSed, prepare an account on several different mining pools : Proportional (Slush) and PPS (BTCGuild).
Try them both for 1 week / month and pick one that you prefer.

FTFY

I agree with johnthedong. DGM has the same long term expected earnings as 0 fee PPS, and depending on the way it's implemented quite low variance - much lower than for scored proportional (Slush) or proportional (DeepBit prop)

Deepbit (proportional) is hoppable. Slush's pool is somewhat hoppable but is a good pool other than that.

You're right, but some of the best pools happen to also be 0% fee, e.g. EMC, Ozcoin, maxbtc, Bitminter. BTCGuild is good if you're after PPS with a fee.

A larger pool will have less variance, but just as much long-term total payout.