Bigger pools = better?

[Chaosbubba]

Just curious, i never bought any expensive rigs to mine on nor do i plan on it, all i plan on doing is updating to an AMD card instead of the Geoforce i have... my question is, right now i only run at 51 megahash, and im mining on bitcoinpool and have made .2 btc in about 3 days (horrible i know) would moving on to, say slosh's pool make me earn a little more? Or does the overall pool's ghash not really affect my small megahash?

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[Auspician]

Bigger pools are not necessarily better or worse.  What they are is more consistent.  The larger the pool, the more regularly a block will be found, and thus the more regular of payments.  More important than this regularity is the pools fee - my primary pool is www.btcguild.com, which operates purely on member donations and is in the top 3 largest pools.  I used to mine with deepbit (the largest pool), but stopped after I decided the fees were too high.

[NothinG]

I used to mine with deepbit (the largest pool), but stopped after I decided the fees were too high.

What do you mean the fees are too high?
Isn't it a 0% Proportional fee?

[neneko]

The pool size/speed doesn't directly affect your income that way. The bigger pool the quicker the pool will get a successful mine and split the profits so in a bigger pool your reward will be updated more often and you will have lower variance in it but you will get the same reward at average. This is disregarding the pool fee's of course.

What I'm trying to say is that a pool doesn't actually make you mine more bitcoins on average. With your hashrate it'd take you on average 834 days to get a hit. That would earn you 50 bitcoins. Most people aren't willing to wait almost two years to see any result so a pool is a good alternative. A pool combines all the processing power and yield results much faster but that doesn't give you more bitcoins. You'll still make 0.06 coins per day on average or 50 coins in 834 days.

[fascistmuffin]

Deepbit has a 3% fee for the proportional.

The main thing big pool have going for them is uptime and payout consistency. At the moment I'm mining at deepbit because BTCGuild is having connection and scaling issues. When those are resolved I'll probably head back there.

With all the ddos attacks and scaling issues of the smaller pools, staying on a pool for more than a few days is rare for me.