When choosing a pool: PPS vs PPLNS vs DGM

[MoreBloodWine]

For someone in it for the long haul and never being offline baring any unforseen issues like harware fail or power outages. What should one consider when chosing a pool, I mine with BitMinter right now and don't have any thoughts on changing but I got bored and was looking at some other pools and their "systems" and it got me to thinking.

What should one look at / consider when choosing a pool ? I mean they all seem the same other than the fees assessed and then their pay method be it DGM, PPS or PPLNS and any others I may not know about, Ty.

[mtnminer]

I was on PPS at EclipseMC and doing well with 120 gh/s, but my miners lost connection in BFGminer and I spent 28 hours tryng to fix it on my end, turns out it is on the pool end!  So I lost 28 hrs of mining at 120 gh/s!

I moved to BTC-Guild as I want reliable 24/7 mining.  I started with PPS, researched and moved to PPLNS.  I am staying with PPLNS as my miners run 24/7 and it pays on average higher than PPS and I get Namecoins that I can convert to Bitcoins or Hold!  I see this a positive to my bottom line.

I am a happy BTC-Guild PPLNS miner adding more Gh/s as fast as I can!

Mtnminer

[eleuthria]

PPS is the steadiest income, but always comes at the highest fee (since the pool operator is paying for bad luck).  It also requires the largest amount of coins to be held by the pool and in the hot wallet in order to meet obligations, leading to highest (only) chances of bankruptcy and more vulnerable to attack.

PPLNS and DGM both vary from pool to pool depending on the variables they choose.  PPLNS with a "really big N" value offer extremely low per-share variance in comparison to non-PPS methods, but BTC Guild is the only pool using a "massive" N value as far as I know (BTC Guild's N value is currently 17.5 billion).  You will still have daily swings based on pool luck, but higher N values reduce the chances of a share being severely underpaid over not paid at all.

DGM's method of offsetting variance is to change block rewards based on round length, so some rounds (fast ones) pay less than 25 BTC, others (long ones) pay more than 25 BTC.  There are other factors involved.

My personal preference (obviously biased as the owner of BTC Guild) is PPLNS for non-PPS.  At least with BTC Guild's implementation of PPLNS, the exact BTC paid to any share is auditable by the user if they want to take the time.  There are no background calculations based on the timing/frequency of share submissions or block solves like DGM/Score which make the *exact* payout difficult/impossible to audit as an end-user.

[TechByPC]

I did a little experiment with block erupters that is now starting its 3rd week.

As of 201312282200 (Eastern US)

BTC Guild    0.00227196   100.00%
Eligius        0.00211533   93.11%
EclipseMC   0.00205489   90.45%
Ghash.IO    0.00183122(0.03799221 GHS * 0.0482) 80.60%

The numbers may not make a lot of sense at the 333MHs rate, but blow these numbers up to be a Block Erupter blade setup at 107GHs and the rewards would play out as follows:

BTC Guild    0.72929916
Eligius        0.67902093
EclipseMC   0.65961969
Ghash.IO    0.58782162

Use the percentages to calculate at whatever hashrate you want. The difference is significant, especially when both EclipseMC and Eligius have 0% fees and BTC Guild 3%. Before anyone cries luck, I’d like to mention that this was over a 2 week time period, which is the amount of time planned for difficulty adjustments. Luck may have something, or even everything to do with it, but if your interest in bitcoin mining is to make a return more than to diversify the network, luck is an important factor.

[AussieHash]

I really like btcguild. They present 2 very useful auditing stats for the end user
"24 hour earnings" - you can calculate your expected mining income for you hashrate at http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty and compare it to your pool income over the last 10 closed shifts
Btcguild also lists their rolling 5-week-luck which seems a steady 103% +/- 0.7 %
They also payout orphans, transaction fees and merge mine NMC.

In comparison I mined with 3TH on ghash.io from 26th Oct - 12th Dec, and using my "average daily hashrate" * "bitcoinwisdom expected daily income per difficulty" I only earned about 86% of expected