Bitcoin Forum

Anybody have experience with these two pools? Where would you earn more? Are the transaction fees worth it? Do you get luckier on Eligius?

Thanks

I have mined on both, ended up settling on bitminter. Not that I have anything bad to say about Eligius.

Personal preference, I believe.


I balance across pools, including Bitminter.  It's reasonable in terms of fees.

Did you settle on bitminter because you make more coin? Also, do you have the donation perk enabled? Does the perk effect your income any? Will having the orphaned block protection make a big difference in your pay than not having it enabled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability

Bitminter,

my experience of Eligius was that I got lured in, as a newbie, by the promise of 0% fees, only to get paid half what I was owed and it was paid months late (although they claim Luke_Jr was having problems programming a payment system, it looked more like a payment scam to me) They claim to have a new payment system now, but once bitten twice shy, and all that...

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

Link to your stats?

My stats are probably long gone, but if you're looking for proof just read the Eligius pool thread on this forum, it's in there somewhere, loads of us were moaning about not being paid.

Oh and I almost forget, even though they said they weren't merge mining, they were in fact merge mining namecoins and keeping them all for themselves!

BitMinter still supports full NMC merged mining on stratum. Eligius has dropped it entirely.

Re: orphaned blocks: Depends how many blocks are orphaned ;-)

I have settled on BitMinter for now too.

BitMinter has been working great for me.

Why not both? CGMiner can mine on 2 pools at the same time with the --balance flag. I'm splitting my hashrate between a few different pools, atm.

I'm relatively new to mining. First started at deepbit, then Eligius. Was happy with Eligius for a while, but lately have been having connecting (getting work reliably from their server). Not sure why, maybe because I'm across the Atlantic?

Was forced to switch to another pool because of my connection problems. Settled on Bitminter. Only mined there for a day, but it seems their system is set up for delayed gratification. I read the whole "shifts" thing but I got more confused by it. In any case, mined there at 2 GH/s for about 20 hours, any only made 0.009 BTC and 0.028 NMC.

This was much less than I expected ... again, maybe there is more I'm "owed" but need to wait for shifts to complete. Not sure, but psychologically it sucks! LOL. Oh well, gonna try Eligius again and see if my connection is more reliable now.

Ozcoin has American, European, and Australian nodes that you can connect to. Check them out!

I started mining about a month ago. I started with Eligius because there was no account creation needed, then evaluated BitMinter for merged mining and finally settled on p2pool.

Eligius is easy, transparent, and only keeps transaction fees. (~1% by my gorilla math) I use them as my failover pool. I was about to try BitMinter but they announced that they were increasing their mandatory fees (to ~1%, but they share transaction fees) so I found p2pool. I now have > 100% pool efficiency so I get a bit of a boost there and have the option of merge mining. Since this is becoming a bit of a hobby, p2pool lets me tinker, have more control, and contributes to decentralizing the network.

Used Eligius for a while, loved it. Then they migrated the server and I started having problems with my miners getting work reliably. Hash rate fell. Slow response by pool operators, intially they denied any problems. Now pool is being migrated to different server again.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=23768.msg2019613#msg2019613


Switched to Bitminter during this. They are either having a really long run of bad luck, or something is wrong. Expected rewards have been consistently below average expected rewards the past few days in a row:

https://bitminter.com/stats/rewards

Now I'm not sure where to go! BTCGuild is dangerously near 51% (not that my hashrate matters, I'm just a drop in the bucket). Deepbit has high fees. Argh!

Try p2pool

I think "a few days" is too short to judge a pool, esp. if things like "luck" are involved.

Don't believe that blockchain.info graph, look at blockorigin (http://blockorigin.pfoe.be/chart.php) instead.

Lists of pools: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.0 and https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools

After Bitminter and slush, Bitparking would get my vote. They don't pay tx fee rewards, but offer 3 merged mined altcoins.

Eligius works out well for me, i eventually get paid 100% pay per share. Ive been doing a lot of alt coin mining recently(purely for profitability) so my unpaid shares tend to get caught up in the time that I'm not on eligius. 

Bitparking also pays for orphans. This is what the transaction fees go towards - keeping an orphan buffer. If the network has averaged 1% orphans in the last 12 months then the 1.5% fee at bitparking is really only 0.5%. Add to that the income from the alt coins and the fee is negative. Disclaimer: I'm a tad biased...

,Totally agree with you, and we experienced the same thing with Eligius (great until server or whatever problems) switched to BitMinter and paltry payouts, even after factoring in the 10 shift thing...

Probably going to try p2pool next... And happy to see Eligius servers running better for me... Now if only they can swiftly fix the stats! Comeon Whiz!

I strongly suspect most pools that have dropped merged Namecoin mining are still mining them and keeping them for themselves. If you go and ask some pool admin why they stopped merged mining Namecoins, the standard reply will invariably be "because it's a PITA (a pain in the ass)". People who mined for a while on Eclipse are having to individually send a request to Inaba to withdraw their Namecoins (https://eclipsemc.com/forums/showthread.php?630-Namecoin-payouts), because he removed the Namecoin stats from the dashboard so we can't even check if we had any balance. Used to be my favorite pool, now I won't touch it with a ten foot pole.

That being said, I'd go with Bitparking (http://mmpool.bitparking.com/pool) where, like pool admin doublec said above, you mine Bitcoin, Namecoin and two other alt currencies at the same time, among other nice features. Interestingly enough, doublec doesn't seem to be having problems keeping all the merged mining going...

You can audit this.  The coinbase on a block that is being mergemined will include a lot of extra garbage.  With Stratum and GBT pools, you can see the coinbase does not contain any merged mining junk.  Example:  The only blocks BTC Guild produces with MM in the codebase are from getwork servers, which pay out the NMC to miners on that protocol.  If you connect to the Stratum side, you will not see any of that because it is not supported in our implementation.

Isn't Eligius the religious one that forces their miners to put bible verses in the block chain?  I don't want to be a part of that.

Yes, Eligius has placed prayers in block headers in the past (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=38007.0); to be fair, however, to my knowledge this has not been done for some time.

FYI, in Catholic dogma Eligius is the patron saint of goldsmiths.

That's because doublec is elite. :) Another pool worth consideration if the prior suggestions don't appeal is HHTT.

What are people thoughts on Eligius and how long does it take to be logged into the pool statistics. I've been mining nonstop for about a week with 2x Radeon 4870 mining at 150 Mhash/s and have probably contributed slightly over 10000 shares and yet theres no mention of when I will be paid. Thoughts?