Bitminter vs. Eligius?

[Ephebus]

Oh and I almost forget, even though they said they weren't merge mining, they were in fact merge mining namecoins and keeping them all for themselves!

I strongly suspect most pools that have dropped merged Namecoin mining are still mining them and keeping them for themselves. If you go and ask some pool admin why they stopped merged mining Namecoins, the standard reply will invariably be "because it's a PITA (a pain in the ass)". People who mined for a while on Eclipse are having to individually send a request to Inaba to withdraw their Namecoins, because he removed the Namecoin stats from the dashboard so we can't even check if we had any balance. Used to be my favorite pool, now I won't touch it with a ten foot pole.

That being said, I'd go with Bitparking where, like pool admin doublec said above, you mine Bitcoin, Namecoin and two other alt currencies at the same time, among other nice features. Interestingly enough, doublec doesn't seem to be having problems keeping all the merged mining going...

[eleuthria]

Oh and I almost forget, even though they said they weren't merge mining, they were in fact merge mining namecoins and keeping them all for themselves!

I strongly suspect most pools that have dropped merged Namecoin mining are still mining them and keeping them for themselves.

You can audit this.  The coinbase on a block that is being mergemined will include a lot of extra garbage.  With Stratum and GBT pools, you can see the coinbase does not contain any merged mining junk.  Example:  The only blocks BTC Guild produces with MM in the codebase are from getwork servers, which pay out the NMC to miners on that protocol.  If you connect to the Stratum side, you will not see any of that because it is not supported in our implementation.

[cp1]

Isn't Eligius the religious one that forces their miners to put bible verses in the block chain?  I don't want to be a part of that.

[Rishodi]

Isn't Eligius the religious one that forces their miners to put bible verses in the block chain?  I don't want to be a part of that.

Yes, Eligius has placed prayers in block headers in the past; to be fair, however, to my knowledge this has not been done for some time.

FYI, in Catholic dogma Eligius is the patron saint of goldsmiths.

[roy7]

That being said, I'd go with Bitparking where, like pool admin doublec said above, you mine Bitcoin, Namecoin and two other alt currencies at the same time, among other nice features. Interestingly enough, doublec doesn't seem to be having problems keeping all the merged mining going...

That's because doublec is elite. Another pool worth consideration if the prior suggestions don't appeal is HHTT.

[Sweetrevenge]

What are people thoughts on Eligius and how long does it take to be logged into the pool statistics. I've been mining nonstop for about a week with 2x Radeon 4870 mining at 150 Mhash/s and have probably contributed slightly over 10000 shares and yet theres no mention of when I will be paid. Thoughts?