Yes, my first approach in this mining universe was trying to create a pool, a group of pools.
Quickly I realised that this would hardly be profitable, mainly due to the enourmous competition.
Then I decided to shift the project towards something to explore this plurality, taking advantage of the interface that I had developed for altpools.xyz group.
That's why when you hit altpools.xyz you're redirected to WhatToMine.org

Currently yes, but it's just a coincidence. Soon I will implement other pool's APIs, so other coins will be available.

You're welcome
Let me know if something changes, like fee, minimum payment, stratum address or port, etc.

Thanks for your support .
Certainly I will add more coins, it's just a matter of time until I implement other pool's APIs.

That's part of the ideia behind the curtains. By keeping track of the blocks mined by these pools directly on the blockchain we will have an unambiguous source or information.
They DON'T tell their orphans block rate, but at least the uncles I can dig out of the blockchain.

Thanks! Indeed I will add more coins and pools, the main problem is that their API is not aways the same and some don't even expose one.

Hello there fellow miners,

A few days ago I launched a website (www.WhereToMine.org) intended to be used primarily as a pools comparisson tool, regarding (for now...) uncles rate, orphans rate and hashrate as sorting options. Up to now 31 pools of ETC, ETH, EXP, MUSIC, SOIL, are listed.
Besides, this platform can also be used as a pannel for the miner who mines in several different pools: just register and create an account, which will link a wallet to a pool.

Feedback is MORE than welcome.

Fellow miners,

We decided to bring down to 0% all pools fees.
Take a look at www.altpools.xyz in give it a shot.
Our servers are Amazon instances in Ohio to provide you a better service with quality and safety.
We are on the road for a month or so, enough to find hundreds of blocks and run thousands of payments.

Thanks in advance!

carlisle1, I'm not sure if you are asking for SSL at the mining endpoint itself. The pool's website indeed has SSL support, but the mining end point does not have. I do not know any mining software that implements SSL for Ethash algorithm. Claymore, as far as I can tell, implements SSL only for ZCash.

Hello Carlisle1, thanks for your feedback. The website does have SSL support. Weren't you redirected to https:// when visiting the regular www.altpools.xyz ?

Guys, I need some heads up here.

The pools group (www.altpools.xyz) has thousands of payments, a neat useful interface, hundreds of blocks found, paid Goolgle and Facebook ads, nice fee and low minimum payout, besides I'm posting and talking to people like crazy, but it is still crawling.

Honestly I feel like an idiot after SO much time, money and effort spent on it.

What am I missing?

Thanks a lot for your support, Igotek, I'm happy you're satisfied.

Thanks a lot, igotek. It means a lot to us, even more considering we just began a couple of weeks ago.

If you follow this link https://altpools.xyz/pools/4bvLhwayhMgKD6a2H/payments you'll see that literally hundreds of payments were already sent.

We are still a tiny pool struggling to grow, as such sometimes a block may take longer to show up, sometimes much less. People are used to connect to a big pool and see small fractions of pending payments all the time, but the same is not to be expected from a smaller one. As the pool's hash power is lower it will take longer to find a block, in return your round share will be much bigger as there are fewer miners to split the block. In the end of the day the return is the same (considering the same fee), but miners often get scared by the lack of constant payments as they are used to in the big ones.

That said, not wanting to abuse your good will, I ask you to keep for at least a day in the pool, so you can have a more realistic experience.

Regarding the coins you mentioned, yes, we are considering to open a Decred pool too. What all the pools currently operational have in common is that they belong to the same family, they are all Ethash algorithm. DCR, SIA, LBRY, PSC are different algos, so it will take a little longer to us to understand them and implement another pool, but they're definitely in our radar.

You're absolutely right. We have tried ETH before and it didn't work because we were not able to gather enough hashing power to find a block in a reasonable time. A group (BRMiners) made a request to recreate that pool, and we were told that 30+ GH/s would be available right at the very begining. Well, it never happened, not even close to it, and we intend to bring it down soon.

What other coins would you recommend?

Sorry, I don't get it, the pool DOES have SSL: https://www.altpools.xyz/
Furthermore it wouldn't stop any website of being hacked. SSL purpose is to solely secure the communication between the user and the website. In the absence of SSL the only thing an attacker would be able to do is to steal data from a single client which he is interested in; specifically in the case of the our website the only sensitive information is the password if one registers. Besides, it wouldn't be an easy task, the attacker must have certain privileges, like access to the network the victim is connect to in order to sniff the packages and retrieve the data.

PS.: Oh, I see, there was a problem with redirection when reaching the website without 'https' in Chrome. Firefox was redirecting just fine. I just fixed it up a few moments ago, thanks for the heads up.

Dear miners,

It is with great satisfaction that I announce the launch of a new group of altcoins mining pools.
Currently we have Ethereum, Expanse, Musicoin, SOILcoin and Ubiq.
These pools have been launched just a couple of weeks ago and we are still struggling to bring in more miners.
Take a look at www.altpools.xyz and please give us a feeback, we want to improve the service even further and offer the best.

Thanks in advance!