So basically the size of the pool only really alters the frequency (through an amount reduction) of payouts?

My address on both my Bitcoin client and in my BTCMine profile have not changed since I started in the pool. I cannot be sure if my client is downloading new block information. When I go to Generate Coins it says not connected, and seems to stay like that as long as I leave it on.

I really didn't expect so many great answers . Thanks everyone for your timely responses, though I couldn't get to them right away. It looks to me like BTC Guild and deepbit are the two major contenders, but I am also interested in a lot of the brand new pools that are starting up. What would the advantage be of joining a smaller newer pool over some of the large ones?

Lastly my problem with BTCMine at the moment hasn't been identified. For some reason or other my profile says I am being sent payments in the proper increments, but they don't seem to be showing up in my Bitcoin client. I'm sure it's not really a problem with the pool itself, but this still presents an opportunity for me to investigate other options while I'm not mining.

Also Quantumplation, please feel free to give me a breakdown of why Eligius may be better for me. I am always open to suggestions .

Hi there,

I am fairly new to Bitcoin, and have been mining on BTCmine for the last week. What I would like to know is which mining pool is the most popular at the moment, and would likely grant me the highest payout for my miner.

I am running on a single Radeon HD 6950 2gb, with an average speed of approx. 340 Mhash/s with GPUminer. I have also been looking into Phoenix miner, but I hear there are problems at the moment.

Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I have been having some problems with BTCmine lately. I've been getting emails saying that payment amounts have been sent, but the balance in my Bitcoin client has not changed in the last 2 days. Is this a side-effect of the server switch? Is there any way I can fix this issue?