How do I find pools to mine in?

[Morpha]

So I am new to this whole thing (I just heard of BC today)....

I downloaded the main BC client.  How do I find pools to mine in?

[1713889557]

1713889557

[linenoise]

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Pooled_mining  gives a list with details.

Personally I like the convenience of eligius, no signing up required and just using your bitcoin address to identify yourself. But it comes down to personal preference.

[lessPlastic]

It's really up to you. Biggest one is deepbit.net but some don't like it for the same reason that it's the biggest one.

[swusc2]

You read the stickied topic that says "Read before you ask for support"

[JusticeForYou]

This site might be of some help to find pools... BitCoinWatch.com

Best Regards,
The Bear

[Apate]

I like http://mining.bitcoin.cz/ purely because it's the first one I came across and I really like the simplicity of the interface. Absolutely up to you though!

[taris]

So I am new to this whole thing (I just heard of BC today)....

I downloaded the main BC client.  How do I find pools to mine in?

It is not just the pool you need - it depends on your hardware as well!
Just downloading the client and start mining won't be enough, because you need a proper graphiccard for that.

Any mining involves a lot of SHA-hashing and the times where a CPU was enough are long gone - a decent CPU will do about 3-6 million hashes per second to solve blocks, but you need to look more at about 250-350 million hashes per second!
Take a look here for a more detailed answer and here for a hardware comparison (you want to look at the columns "Model" and "Mhash/s").

[Katapult]

I liked Eligius at first, but they left a sour taste after they disabled their US server earlier today, which is the one I was using.  That wouldn't be that bad if the EU and US contributions were combined, but they're not, so I'm now stuck with 0.25 BTC on their US server, and 0.013 on their EU server.  I'm keeping faith that they will re-establish the US server soon so I can continue working towards my first BTC, but it did leave a sour first experience.  Not to mention that they had us "bank" some of our credits on yesterday's short blocks which they will pay us back on long blocks in the future, which can only happen after they re-enable the US server.

There are bound to be kinks in the beginning of any tech project, and the bottom-line question is whether you have enough faith / trust in the pool admins to get things back into shape.

[samr7]

Biggest one is deepbit.net but some don't like it for the same reason that it's the biggest one.

Not just because it's the largest, but also because in the best case, the fees amount to 3% or so.  Not sure how this affects payout in the long run.

I use bitcoinpool.com, which charges no fees, but is relatively small.  Because of the size, payouts vary a lot.  Yesterday was a really good day and we made 50% above the estimate from the http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php.  So far today has been under the estimate.

[grue]

any pool is good. just choose one with no fees, and not too big (anything above 40% = possible threat to network)

[nhodges]

GUIMiner comes with several of the most popular pools pre-configured, and supports retrieving and displaying your current balance at the pools it provides. Most people are apt to join one of these pools, but if you feel like contributing to an alternate pool, check out the Mining Pools subforum.

[Wizard-Ninja]

BTCGuild is pretty good. No fees. Aside from transaction fees, but afaik nearly every pool takes those.