Bitcoin Forum

Say you're mining with a shiny new Avalon: 66GH/s of gleaming aluminum computation, and you're contemplating mining in a pool which takes a cut.

At the current market price and difficulty— ignoring stales, risk of operator theft, txn fees, etc, how much is this decision going to cost you in pool fees?

*  0% pool / solo = $0/month (obviously)
*  2% pool =    $266/month
*  3% pool =    $400/month
* 10% pool = $1,331/month

_Per Avalon_.

This wasn't news to me, but I was pointing it out to someone else and though the absolute value of the numbers were amusing.

It's an interesting point really, but I would expect (possibly even as a result of this post) for some pools to lower their fees for heavy g/h contributors.

It's perhaps an argument that some asic users should chip in to buy Forrestv a device of their preference from someone who already has one in hand to make sure that p2pool supports the devices well.

This is a cool thread to follow. Interesting numbers there.

I'd love to see a break down, by pool to compare and hopefully create some competition between them by doing so.  If one pool is $1000/mo cheaper, guess where I'm mining :)

Don't see what the problem is, 3% (or even 10%) of a lot of money is a lot of money, but 97% (or only 90%) is still much more money. And the pool operator is providing an essential service.

That said, I do think it would be best for Bitcoin if P2Pool can be made ASIC compatible. Decentralisation and all that.

I'm mining on bitparking at the moment, so I can capture 3 altcoins via merged-mining in addition to the BTC revenue.

The altcoin revenue more than makes up for the pool's 2.5% fee, and being straight PPS I don't have to worry about variance, orphans, etc.

I have it set up to payout directly to the exchange account, so I don't even have to run the altchain clients.

You also should point out the different types of pools.

PPS @ 4% will also pay you even if the pool is unlucky.  The 4% allows the operator to cover the "dry spells" as you get paid no matter what happens.

Indeed, but I don't think it's clear that the value of the services provided are proportional to the user's hashrate. Arguably they are most valuable when your hashrate is the smallest.
Right now the only remaining issue that I'm aware of is that the Avalon devices always take 1.4 seconds to return work. This is similar the the issue with the old BFL FPGAs though not as bad. There are a couple ways that P2Pool could be changed to work better with this, though it sounds like the BFL produces (should they ship) will not have this limitation.

It will— indeed. At least unless the pool op runs out of money. OTOH, you don't get paid extra when the pool solves a lot of blocks.  Somewhat interesting: The time between blocks is exponentially distributed, and the median of the exponential distribution is less than the mean. This means that it's more likely than not that solo mining will make you more than PPS (even ignoring pool fees) but when it doesn't— it may be pretty bad. :)

One should start a new pool with lower fees, I be okay with 1%, this a good time to do this... I mean if I solo how long before I have to go back to a pool?

Pools that are honest and upfront about charging 3% and pay daily PPS are generally much better than pools that claim to have 0% fee but then keep all the processing fees, namecoins and come up with some wierd delayed payment scam scheme.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

You learn from experience.  ;)

Sure hasn't been my experience. :)

Some of you Avalon owners should consider mining at BitMinter... they have 0% fee, merged namecoin mining, and split block tx fees in exchange for a bit of variance as it's PPLNS.  Of course the variance is inversely proportional to the pool's hashrate, and right now one Avalon is equal to about 2.5% of the pool's hashrate so each additional device makes a noticable effect on lowering variance.
*disclaimer: I mine at BitMinter :p (but sadly do not own an Avalon)

I can also recommend BitMinter, sadly no experience with Avalon but I have some GPUs doing a good job there.

As I don't have an Avalon I haven't got the change to test, but wouldn't solo mining be just fine with that kind of hashrate?

Woah, Eleuthria must be a really happy man! :D

yeah make sure  u dont mined sheat on eclipse emc  witch is run by the scam artist over at bfl

look at how of a liar of slimmmy snake he is
he gonnna take one day all the pool eargnings and retire
we really need to starve that snake

I do have avalon and i am mining at bitminter and i have always (before and after) donated my 2.5% to the owner because he deserves it 100%. What is the difference then we always were paying 2.5% nothing changes. What changes is our hash rate and that is all.

We ASIC owners are  supposed to be "the rich guys". In all around the world rich ones pay more or at least it is about to happen. So why we are crying for? Every one is free to mine solo so please go ahead.

in my personal opinion 95% of the ASIC owners ( no hard feelings guy's) do not have a clue how to mine solo anyway. They have to pay their tax to the pool. If they do not like it i wish them luck try/error combined with bad luck + stales may turn out quite bitter expensive at the moment for them


I am not a bitminter advocate but guy's stick to your favorite pool (with few for backup ), pay your tax and please do not calculate operator income. They all deserved it for sure

The answer is simple you mine where it works!

Saying all this i am about to open a pool in projections the pool up time is about 30% come and join me and of course 0% fee :)

And i can offer similar 0% fee pools for backup also so you will be sure that fee is laways zero and your income will be reduced with 70%. assuming 3% fee equals 1000.m in your example you are losing about 23000K per month - nice deal a?

Now pools are giving work which is at difficulty 16 or 32 or higher to ASICs— this reduce their work per has by the same factor.

I do not get (understand) that comment can you be more specific?

I've offered Forrest and ckolivas access to my units, hopefully this will be corrected shortly. Ckolivas is going to start working Monday if all goes well.

Helps take the sting out of the 1250 btc oopsie with the .8 upgrade, I'm sure.