Re: Mining pools list

[DrHaribo]

Which mining pool is the most profitable currently?

That's an interesting question, which noone actually tries to give a real answer to. Probably because it's a little complex. Which pool is most profitable to mine for you depends on a lot of factors. I'd say there are two main influences on how profitable a pool will be for you. One is variance, which is determined by pool hashrate and reward system (PPS, DGM, others). The more variance the more luck will influence your profits. The other I'd call the expected average income. The variance tells you how far the income is likely to vary from the expected average over the short term.

Expected average income is determined by a lot of factors, which many miners probably don't realize:

• Which ratio of rejected work are you getting? Some pools have a higher average reject ratio than other pools. On some pools your individual reject ratio may be especially low. Some pools artificially lower your reject ratio by paying rejected work. This is not actually an improvement. It means people with low reject ratio (good setup) are forced to give some of their income to people with high reject ratio (bad internet line, bad equipment).
• What ratio of orphaned blocks does the pool have? (ignore for pps pools)
• What's the average income from a block in the pool?  (ignore for pps pools) Some pools will have a higher income from transaction fees. Some pools keep the transaction fees and don't pay them out to miners.
• How much of a bonus do you get from merged mining? Depends on which other coins are merged mined, their current value compared to bitcoin, average income per block for the pool, orphan ratio for the merged coins, difficulty, etc.
• What is the pool fee?
• Other factors I forgot?

There are some factors that are the same for all pools, like bitcoin difficulty, bitcoin value and your expenses, like electricity. Bitcoin mining calculators seem to cover these well, but they don't cover most of the factors above that are individual to each pool.

All that said, there's a lot of other reasons for picking a pool than a small difference in mining income.

[organofcorti]

Which mining pool is the most profitable currently?

That's an interesting question, which noone actually tries to give a real answer to. Probably because it's a little complex. Which pool is most profitable to mine for you depends on a lot of factors. I'd say there are two main influences on how profitable a pool will be for you. One is variance, which is determined by pool hashrate and reward system (PPS, DGM, others). The more variance the more luck will influence your profits. The other I'd call the expected average income. The variance tells you how far the income is likely to vary from the expected average over the short term.
<snip>

So I've included a profitability chart. This uses the weekly totals of:
1. shares
2. reward + tx fee
3. expected shares
4. reward

and then tracks [(weekly reward + weekly tx fee) / weekly shares] / [weekly reward / weekly expected shares]

This means that such factors as orphan rate, total tx fee, and pool luck are included. Reward method is not taken into account - I'm assuming for most pools that reward methods (apart from PPS) with be close to the calculated values.

Pool fee of course is not included, but I think this is a good basis from which to start comparing pools.

What do you think, Dr. H?

[DrHaribo]

Interesting. Looks like a very good start.

Adding pool fee should be pretty easy. Merged mining will take more work.

What are expected shares?

[organofcorti]

Interesting. Looks like a very good start.

Adding pool fee should be pretty easy. Merged mining will take more work.

I'm not attempting merged mining. It's a shame, but I just don't have the time to maintain this sort of thing for two cryptocoins. I wish I did.

Even adding pool fee will be hard - no one has the pool fee in a json feed, and the data sources have to be as hands off as possible. I don't want to add a fee that can change and then only finding out abut the change weeks or months later.

What I will do is add the weekly results to a table so that they will be easier to compare if.

What are expected shares?

Sum(difficulty) for all valid blocks solved by a pool, whereas shares is sum(d1 equiv shares) for all blocks, including orphaned blocks.

[Inaba]

Poof fee is very important though, to accurately gauge your mining efficiency.  Without that, it doesn't really work to compare different pools with the above information. 

I'd be glad to add the fee to the json feed of EMC, but our fee has always remained the same since the start. 0% for DGM.

[organofcorti]

Poof fee is very important though, to accurately gauge your mining efficiency.  Without that, it doesn't really work to compare different pools with the above information.  

I'd be glad to add the fee to the json feed of EMC, but our fee has always remained the same since the start. 0% for DGM.

Ha! Very easy to add your fee

If the main pools that appear in the weekly stats agree to add a fee indicator to their current API so that this can run without constant monitoring on my part, then I'll include it. Unfortunately it has to be something all pools decide to do otherwise the pools that do add the fee are disadvantaged.

Personally, I don't think it is a significant issue though - for most pools variation in orphan rates, tx fees and pool luck obscure income differences caused by pool fees. If I was doing monthly or quarterly averages fee effects might be more obvious.

Otherwise it might be best to call it a 'Pool profit indicator" rather than a "miner profit indicator".


Edit: An API field that indicates the amount paid to miners per block (including NMC converted to BTC) would take into account pool fee, merged mining and whether the tx fee is included or not.  Going forward I think this would be optimal. Any pools that include this in their API would be in the chart, others would not. What do you think?

[Inaba]

Hmm yeah that's probably a workable idea and should be pretty easy to implement.  I can look at adding that... where should that be added into the API, in your opinion?

[organofcorti]

Hmm yeah that's probably a workable idea and should be pretty easy to implement.  I can look at adding that... where should that be added into the API, in your opinion?

I'd include it with all the other block stats, another field alongside shares per round etc.

Edit: Thinking about it a bit more, I realise this wouldn't suit pools with more than one reward method, eg both DGM and PPS since the block reward would go to both and the estimated fee for the luck based reward method would be too high.

So I think one field recording the total income per block (including txfee and altcoins valued in BTC) and another field recording the fee (as a decimal number) would be necessary.

[kano]

Hmm, guess I should add this.
Never remembered to.

Pool:                            Kano
Website:                      https://kano.is/
Proxy:                          No
Generation address:   Coinbase TxN says: ckpool/Kano
Payout method:          PPLNS
Fee:                             0.9%
Pay Tx Reward:            Yes
Vardiff:                        18 SPM or User Defined
Local Work:                 stratum
Pay Orphans:              No
Min Withdrawal:           Payout per block
Merge Mining:             No

[OverHash]

Hi organofcorti,

If you could add us to the list it would be much appreciated!

Pool:                      OverHash
Website:                 https://overhash.com
Proxy:                    No
Generation address:  1CCthH92M2FtNuVGzyfmf4Cz9N648M9QPJ
Payout method:        PPLNS
Fee:                       1%
Pay Tx Reward:        Yes
Vardiff:                   18 SPM
Local Work:             Stratum
Pay Orphans:           No
Min Withdrawal:       0.001
Merge Mining:          No

Hopefully thats all the information you need, if you need anything else flick us a pm!

[organofcorti]

Hmm, guess I should add this.
Never remembered to.

Pool:                            Kano
Website:                      https://kano.is/
Proxy:                          No
Generation address:   Coinbase TxN says: ckpool/Kano
Payout method:          PPLNS
Fee:                             0.9%
Pay Tx Reward:            Yes
Vardiff:                        18 SPM or User Defined
Local Work:                 stratum
Pay Orphans:              No
Min Withdrawal:           Payout per block
Merge Mining:             No

When I was still mining, I would have added it before you'd had a chance to request it

[organofcorti]

Hi organofcorti,

If you could add us to the list it would be much appreciated!

Pool:                      OverHash
Website:                 https://overhash.com
Proxy:                    No
Generation address:  1CCthH92M2FtNuVGzyfmf4Cz9N648M9QPJ
Payout method:        PPLNS
Fee:                       1%
Pay Tx Reward:        Yes
Vardiff:                   18 SPM
Local Work:             Stratum
Pay Orphans:           No
Min Withdrawal:       0.001
Merge Mining:          No

Hopefully thats all the information you need, if you need anything else flick us a pm!

That's fine, check the listing to make sure I haven't made a mistake.

[kano]

Wondering if there's a reason to not include block witholding effect in the 2nd post?
(Since you include Hoppability)

i.e. it's effect on 3 things: 1) The Miners 2) The Pool Operator 3) The Block Withholder

It's Meni Rosenfeld's work. If he updates, then I'll update the post. I copy pasted it because I didn't think anyone would click on a link.

Heh, I just noticed, no idea why I didn't before, Meni did already include a comment about withholding for SMPPS but left it out of PPS.

Odd, coz the affect on the pool OP for PPS is a major issue that will send any but a large pool broke quickly, if it happens, if the pool doesn't charge a high PPS fee.

Maybe he left it out coz he thinks all pools should end up using PPS
(i.e. mitigate the risk by charging high fees)

[oceancucumber]

Hello and happy new year!

I'm new to the world of crypto currencies, but I am seasoned software engineer.  During my Christmas vacation I have been diving right in.  One of my learning projects was to make a stratum mining pool. Here's the info:

Pool:                Cucumber Pool
Website:             http://cucumberpool.us
Proxy:               No
Generation address:  N\A
Coinbase signature:
Payout method:       PPS
Fee:                 .1 - config default, is this %?
Pay Tx Reward:       No
Vardiff:             2016
Local Work:          stratum
Pay Orphans:         No
Min Withdrawal:      1
Merge Mining:        No

As you can see, I'm a little unsure on the fee above.  It's an MPOS application, so is the .1 10%, 0.1%, or just .1 bitcoins?

Edited 1/1/2015 - figured a few things out except for the fee.
Edited 1/4/2015 - changed to PPS based on senior user recommendation

[Digitalmocking]

Quick easy question;

What's the best pool or pools for someone just starting doing ASIC mining?  I'm interested in stability and reliability as well as ease of getting going.

[DrHaribo]

Quick easy question;

What's the best pool or pools for someone just starting doing ASIC mining?  I'm interested in stability and reliability as well as ease of getting going.

I spent a lot of effort trying to make Bitminter easy to use for beginners. So you could give us a try.

That said you'll probably find most pools fairly stable and fairly easy to use. So it probably comes down to personal preference.

If you try a couple different pools then you can easily observe stability and ease of use. But be careful when you compare payouts. Most beginners don't understand the different mining reward systems well and forget that daily payouts depend a lot on luck with most of them. Another popular misconception is that if you have hashrate X then a certain pool is best. The hashrate doesn't matter. The questions you are asking are much more relevant and that's a good start already.

Good luck

[Digitalmocking]

Quick easy question;

What's the best pool or pools for someone just starting doing ASIC mining?  I'm interested in stability and reliability as well as ease of getting going.

I spent a lot of effort trying to make Bitminter easy to use for beginners. So you could give us a try.

That said you'll probably find most pools fairly stable and fairly easy to use. So it probably comes down to personal preference.

If you try a couple different pools then you can easily observe stability and ease of use. But be careful when you compare payouts. Most beginners don't understand the different mining reward systems well and forget that daily payouts depend a lot on luck with most of them. Another popular misconception is that if you have hashrate X then a certain pool is best. The hashrate doesn't matter. The questions you are asking are much more relevant and that's a good start already.

Good luck

Oddly enough I just registered on Bitminter after reading around a bit.  My power supplies get here monday, so I'll be there shortly!

Thanks for the work you put into bitminter, it really was easy and friendly.

[DrHaribo]

Good stuff

[raskul]

please remove central cavern from the OP, it's been taken offline. thanks.

[organofcorti]

please remove central cavern from the OP, it's been taken offline. thanks.

Done.