Bitcoin Forum

As an experiment, I have had my two computers, with exactly the same motherboards and same 3 video cards in each pointing at the two.  BTCguild, even with it's problems the last three days, has returned more than deepbit.  I would have thought it would be the other way around.  Doesn't a larger pool mean larger returns?

In the last 24 hours, even though BTCguild was having display issues, the return was significantly better.  Was I just lucky the last three days with that system.

PS, this is before fees or donations calculated in, so that isn't it.

How much are you donating at BTCGuild?

2.5%

again, this is looking at it before fees or donations.  With the fees, BTCguild is a lot better of course, since it can be much lower.  PS, I also added unconfirmed into Deepbit in my calculations.

So you are just experiencing variance. BTCGuild had better luck than deepbit over the past few days.

The real difference is when you pay less fee.

All things equal (except size which only affects variance), over time, you will earn more Bitcoins in pools where you pay less fee.

Bolded portion: NO. Larger pools just reduce variance. Amount of bitcoins to you stays the same. Larger pools will find blocks faster, but you'll get paid less for each block found by the pool, enough that it evens out EXACTLY.

Any short term variations should be just that: variations.

Now, this is assuming stuff like pool hopping isn't happening...

Most pools (I can't say with confidence which) protect against pool hopping in their code. BTCGuild and Deepbit might be exceptions.

Anyway, yes BTCGuild being smaller will tend to be luckier or unluckier than deepbit (more variance). On average though it will be about 3% better than deepbit due to fees. .5% better if you want instant payout/no invalids/etc., this is in the long term though.

what exactly is pool hopping and how does that help mining?

I moved to slushs pool and im getting better results than deepbit also. Also I like to know that im not contributing to a centralized bitcoin system. LEAVE DEEPBIT!!

Since the new BTC Guild servers have been up I keep trying BTC Guild. Problem is I get significantly more idle messages than with deepbit or slush's pool. Also my stale rate is a percent or two higher on BTC Guild. Because of this I keep going back to slush's pool and deepbit. Are others not experiencing these issues with BTC Guild?

No it does not, countenoobintuitively apparently  ;D

ALL pool mining is contributing to a centralized system the way pools are working now.
it is not just deepbit, it is the fact that someone can bring the the top 3 or 5, hell 10 or 20 entitys of the network under his control (easily possible for governments) and have total power.
this is exactly what is NOT supposed to be possible to happen in a decentralized p2p system. pools need to work different PERIOD, otherwise any pool is nearly as bad as deepbit right now.

What type of earning are you setup for at deepbit?  If its PPS, then of course BTCguild will yield more given the same variance.

This

you have to look at stales, too. i've been getting about 4% stales on btcguild, but since i like its frontend the most, i sticked with it. now that it's being ddos'ed, i've switched back to btcmine to see my stales drop to 0.5%. i guess given all this i'll stay at btcmine. seems like larger server equals a lot higher stale rate. i love how they close registrations when they think their server can't handle any more miners. they don't seem to be too greedy.

I agree, although btcmine's frontend isn't great, it does have a consistently low stales rate for me too.

My only issue is that they always have server issues. That's what always puts me off. I don't understand why they encourage their users to connect to specific server. Just have them in a cluster and load balance etc.