POOLS -------- how to detect a proffessional working pool and an amatour one

[bitwho]

Could we make a sticky thread about pools?  We have few sticky about new coins and trades. Could we also have a sticky post with useful information about pools. What they are. What is their purpose. How to spot a good one. How to spot a bad one.

Calling out all the old timers, the old dogs, the ones that went through a few ugly crypto wars.  This is a great community. Let come together and compile some standards. Share with us your stories. Share with us your secrets. Share with us your knowledge.

Please, lets get something rolling

[BayAreaCoins]

www.LocalMiners.com

[bitwho]

no help?

[adversor]

on spelling errors in headlines?

[bitwho]

 

Dang it. i even Googled "amateur" . to make sure i got the right word

[Protato]

The best indicator is the number of coins that the pool runs, some pools have sites dedicated to 5+ coins whereas some only have 1 or 2, it is the ones with many coins that normally have a bigger group as well as being more reliable.

Nut2pools, coinium, dedicatedpool are all good choices but their fees may be more hefty as they provide more for each miner.

[bitwho]

could we talk pool tricks? for example when a coin is premined , everyone comes and starts yelling scam this and scam that and its a behavior excepted and rewarded upon. yet with pools we don't call out the ones that did not perform as their advertised. 

an eye opener for me was when some one accused a pool operator with this cheat :

You know that during the 1000% round you were skimming coins.  There is no reason for the round to go that long, and the resulting payout for some during that 20 minute round be half of what it said it was supposed to be for one round.

I run a pool .  I know how the back-end works.  Either you had issues with the cronjobs being locked up and not processing, or you switched out the wallets, and scammed the coins during that downtime.  And even if your cronjobs failed, when they ran again, the cronjobs would query the DB and account for all the missing past work.  Not account for half a round's rewards once it came back up. 



this is something that i noticed in few other pools. is this a common error or could well be a manipulation of the wallets?


Does anyone else know other signs that we can detect and figure out if were are being tricked.

[bitwho]

i didn't use that pool so i don't have a problem..

but i have seen a lot of small pools to go have a lot of extra share %. i remember on a pool for an other coin premier every other block was going %2000..  only now i am starting to realize that this is either a sign of a error from a small pool or simple coin-jacking. The same pool performed the same way with coinyecoin. I knew better this time and i steered away from it. it was sad to see people complain that they were not receiving anything. i used an old pool and raked a lot of coins.

[bitwho]

Could we please have a sticky topic about all the pools like we have for new coins. Or a sub forums.


Me and new users like me , have little to no informations how pools run. It would be so useful if we could come together and created some guide and information topics

Also is there a way pools could show the block found counts?

[MisO69]

I just solo new coins. That is the way it should be. Pool operators shouldn't get into the initial instamine imo. That should be just us miners, no one else.

As for identifying noob pools. If its a pool without a familiar name I just assume its some kid setting up a pool on his home internet connection. I never touch those, do not trust them. Go with big pools that have multiple coins, have been around for a while and no complaints, lots of miners on them. These new popups could be scams. Scams everywhere.

[bitwho]

I just solo new coins. That is the way it should be. Pool operators shouldn't get into the initial instamine imo. That should be just us miners, no one else.

As for identifying noob pools. If its a pool without a familiar name I just assume its some kid setting up a pool on his home internet connection. I never touch those, do not trust them. Go with big pools that have multiple coins, have been around for a while and no complaints, lots of miners on them. These new popups could be scams. Scams everywhere.

Here is the problem. A new coins come up. It introduces a pool. Over 100 users signed up. What am i going to do now? I cant solo mine against all that hash. They will find all the blocks.

Here is the other catch now. I just had a pool with 8 other coins tell me that due to high user ratio. The pool close down and now i get a few coins. Where the pool found most of the blocks for 4 hours. What do i do now? How can i figure out whats going on. ? I feel like were are allowing this kind of scam go unnoticed.