Bitcoin Forum

If I had two 5870's, mining 24/7 at about 350 Mhash/s each, what do people feel would be the better mining option?

A) Pick a pool and have both GPU's mining in the same pool constantly.

B) Pick 2 pools and have one GPU mining in each pool constantly.

C) Solo mining.

From what I read using pools in some way would be better than solo mining for the amount of Mhash/s I will be able to utilise (correct me if I'm wrong). I personaly was going to go with option B as I felt mining from two pools would help compensate for either pool having any unexpected down time or one pool having a bad day for whatever reason.

Any thoughts?

Running each GPU in separate pools is a great idea.

Running 2 GPU's in different pools would help minimize variance a little, but you're going to be hard pressed to find 2 pools at the same speed.
I would say put them both in 1 decent sized pool. If you double your speed then consider splitting it between 2 pools.

Solo is a personal choice, but @ 700 Mh/s you're looking at an average of 17.33 day to find a block. Probably not worth it.

Use cdhowie's flexible mining proxy (http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=5506.msg106640#msg106640) if you are concerned with pool downtime.  It rocks.

Two pools. Better for the network.

So why would I need two pools at the same speed? And by speed do you mean the overall Mhash/s of each pool?

It's just a psychological thing. If you're in 1 pool that's 50 MH/s and another that's 100 MH/s you're only going to get half as much from the bigger pool, though theoretically you should get it twice as often.

I suppose the best thing will be to test it when my cards arrive.

I'll run them both in one pool for one week then both in another pool for another week and then split them for the final week. I'll probably use slush's and deepbit. They seem to be the most popular and reliable as far as I can see. Unless anyone has any other pool suggestions.

Why are you mining?

The only real advantage of using the largest pools is seeing your balance go up every five minutes. But it's better for network security to use smaller pools.

How about you spare the newbies the rhetoric before they start mining. All you have to say is that there are plenty of other smaller pools that they can check out other than deepbit or slush.


There's lots of pools.

Bitcoinpool.com and btcguild.com and btcmine.com have no fees.

How about you lose the bad attitude.

I might if your intention was to be helpful in any way instead of making a statement that hardly makes sense to someone who isn't even mining yet. If you don't want newbies going to deepbit and slush then give them a real reason not to, not a completely useless statement as to why not.

Compared to your even more useless statement?

Calm down guys! You've both been helpful. Thank you.

I've got 3 5870s and am currently mining in 3 different pools.  I like each pool for different reasons so I decided it would be best to spread the love.  The benefit of redundancy (in case a pool goes down) is nice as well.

His statement was helpful, helpful to the health of the Bitcoin network, thus helpful to anyone that mines Bitcoins. A more real reason I cannot come up with.

One can only hope that making such statements would influence newbies to actually research why such statements are valid and learn something about what they are doing, hopefully choosing to contribute to the health of the network.

I run in two pools as well roughly 50/50.  It gives me a redundancy and a chance to compare the qualities of both. 

The user is asking about what other pools he should check out.


This is not an answer to the users question.

If you want new users to understand the position of network security then you should have a link that can explain it to them in simple terms and give them good reasons to go to smaller pools. Less or no fees is a good start especially for someone just starting out. If you just drop a one liner on them and expect them to go figure out what you're talking about you're not going to reach very many of them, and you most likely haven't answered their question.

You catch more flies with honey.

I will be doing my own testing but it seems two pools would be a good way to go.

So when people mention "security of the network" is it better to support the newer/smaller pools to help increase the popularity of bitcoins to give it more chance of surviving in ther future. Theres probably more to it than that but would that be a basic summarisation of what is meant buy network security?

Large pools are bad for the security of the network because if a single pool gets more than 50% of the network's total power, the person who controls that pool can control the network and be able to spend the same coins twice.

The Bitcoin network is strong if it is distributed. Fewer points of failure that one could attack. Everyone mining for one (or few) pool hurts the distributed nature of the network. If that (those) pool should happen to go down and the miners don't have failsafes, the network computational power is decreased, which could allow someone with massive amounts of computational power to attack the network. A successful attack on the network could undermine the value of Bitcoins which would make mining pointless.

A healthy network has millions of points of failure, so it probably won't fail.

Edit: And of course, the famous >50% attack.

sounds much better than