Good point! I didn't look at it from that perspective.

One more question (a little bit off-topic): one would expect a pool to have no luck (or bad luck) at all in the long term. How can Arsbitcoin then have such a large buffer?

Are you sure you get paid a fixed value?

This is what the eligius website says:
If there are sufficient pool funds earned to pay them all in full PPS, that happens. If not, the miners are paid proportional to available funds.

Lucas, if this is the case, should one then not try to use a method that has an outcome which is highly predictable? If I understood it right, using the SMPPS method it can occur that you get less than expected in some rounds and more than expected in other rounds?

btw: how much fee does eligius have?

Hi all,

I want to start mining. One of the questions I have is: which pool should I join?
Here https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools is an overview of all (?) pools.

The differences between the pools seems to be:

Location  - Where is the server hosted?
Hashrate (GHash/sec) - How many GH/s a pool does.
Reward Type - PPS / SMPPS / ESMPPS / Prop. / PPLNS or Score
Transaction fees - how many percent goes to the pool operator
Audits - audits yes/no?
Protocol - Most have RPC (+LP)
Launched - when was the pool launched

I am wondering which of these properties are relevant when making a choice for a specific pool...



My initial top 3:
1. Transaction fee: the more fee goes to the pool operator, the less fee remains for miners. So a pool with a low fee is favorable.

2. Reward Type:
      - PPS (Pay Per Share) seems to be the best reward type. It is completely predictable, you know in advance how much and when(!) you get your money. You are not dependent on round-boundaries. Unfortunately there are not too many PPS-pools.
      - PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares). This seems to be a good second choice. You know in advance how much you get, although not when.
      - Proportional. This doesn't seem to be a good choice. You don't know how much you get, and you don't know when you get it.

3. Hashrate: when you choose for PPS, hashrate doesn't matter at all. If you choose for PPLNS or Proportional, you want to join a pool with a high hashrate. This makes that you have to wait less long for your payout (although it doesn't say anything about your expected income).



Please share your thoughts on this subject. Did I miss something? Or am I wrong?

Hi,

At this moment I am installing my own Simplecoin instance. Something I was wondering is why simplecoin has, beside a password, also a pincode? Anybody knows why? Is a password alone not secure enough?

regards,
Max