Please share your pool choiches and why you switched

[cczerouno]

As a noob, I feel choosing a pool is something between business and religion :-D
These has been my choices until now, and the reason of the switch.
Why not share yours, and help me and other noobs to understand businesses and religions of new world?

Actual sha256 power: 500 GH/s
* bitminter (2%+ fee, and too much variance from my noob perspective)
* cex.io (doesn't have automated payouts, and as most noobs it's sweet to have my coins daily in my locally encrypted wallet without worrying)
* eligius (my actual pool, solves previous problems, has free automated payouts spendable after 120 block confirmation)

I will be happy to choose a smaller pool and help the network to be resilient to oligopoly, if the pool has reasonable fees, variance, and possibly automated payouts.

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[os2sam]

Please share your pool choiches and why you switched

No

[os2sam]

Read this and make your own decisions for your own reasons.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.msg1146108#msg1146108

Wish you the best,
Sam

[HellDiverUK]

I've been round them all in my year of mining, and I keep on coming back to Eligius and BTCGuild.  I started off on Slush's (most people used it back then), then used itzod.ru until it had it's Gibson hacked, and the spent a long time on BTCGuild.  Tried p2pool for a while, and ended up trying Eligius when it hit the heady heights of 200GH.  Sort of been there ever since, because it Just Works(tm).

[xstr8guy]

I've been round them all in my year of mining, and I keep on coming back to Eligius and BTCGuild.  I started off on Slush's (most people used it back then), then used itzod.ru until it had it's Gibson hacked, and the spent a long time on BTCGuild.  Tried p2pool for a while, and ended up trying Eligius when it hit the heady heights of 200GH.  Sort of been there ever since, because it Just Works(tm).

I split my 3THs evenly between the 3 biggest pools (GHash.io, BTCGuild and Eligius) to reduce my variance. This way I get a fair share of 70% of all blocks mined.

There just isn't enough time left before mining becomes unprofitable for the home miner. And I don't have the patience to spend days on a single pool when they are going through a long stretch of terrible luck.  Otherwise I'd mine at Bitminter. 

[cczerouno]

Read this and make your own decisions for your own reasons.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=104664.msg1146108#msg1146108

Thanks os2sam, I didn't saw this interesting topic. It reports the chinese "Discus Fish" is a major pool but it seems exclusive to China, so it's not detailed.
I already choose my pool, and I think I'm able to choose next pools by myself.
This post isn't for looking for advices, but ony for social-friendly sharing of personal experiences, not included in the linked topic.
P.S.: in the '80s I was developing on OS/2 :-)

[cczerouno]

There just isn't enough time left before mining becomes unprofitable for the home miner. And I don't have the patience to spend days on a single pool when they are going through a long stretch of terrible luck.

Well spotted xstr8guy, that's one of the main reasons I switched to eligius, acceptable variance and automated free payouts.

[os2sam]

This post isn't for looking for advices, but ony for social-friendly sharing of personal experiences, not included in the linked topic.

I the past when someone would post this question it usually devolved into ugly arguments and name calling.  That hasn't happened this time, I'm very happy to see.  Sorry for sounding cynical before.

[os2sam]

P.S.: in the '80s I was developing on OS/2 :-)

Ah, the pre GUI versions.  If you can't do it from the command line then it doesn't need to be done

I started with 2.0 with the WPS.  I still really like it allot.

[nickenburg]

I split my 3THs evenly between the 3 biggest pools (GHash.io, BTCGuild and Eligius) to reduce my variance. This way I get a fair share of 70% of all blocks mined.

There just isn't enough time left before mining becomes unprofitable for the home miner. And I don't have the patience to spend days on a single pool when they are going through a long stretch of terrible luck.  Otherwise I'd mine at Bitminter. 

How much did you spend on all that equipment?
And how much bitcoins have you earned, and are you expecting to earn?
I am very interested in buying some mining equipment to.
Can you give me some advise pls, on what to buy and if 3 Th's is even enough?

[Hunterbunter]

This may or may not be helpful, but have you considered a p2pool node?

They have varying fees, and all of them have automatic bitcoin payouts, and some have small differences where they pay out merge mining, etc.

For example, the new pool node I set up recently:

p2pool node, so small node connected to larger pool to reduce variance, and if you set up backup p2pool nodes, if my server goes down cgminer will automatically connect to another and you won't lose your shares/sec etc.
1% fee
automatic bitcoin payouts (default p2pool node behaviour)
devcoin payouts daily (subject to 100dvc accumulated threshold)
Merged mining
- all devcoin blocks found are paid out to miners split by hash power over previous 24 hours.
- all other altcoins found (namecoin, i0coin, ixcoin) are used to produce the 0.2% bonus payout, which is paid in devcoins (because of it's price stability and easy volume)

Miner bonuses:
0.2% gross pool throughput (valued in btc) is paid out in devcoins to an attached devcoin address on the main site
 - this has 10,000 minimum devcoins/day payout split by hashpower over the day for the time being.

As a charity thing I also pay out the 0.2% gross pool throughput figure to open source developers on the bitcoin and devcoin share lists. You can find out more at http://blisterpool.com if you're interested. Otherwise, happy searching!

[xstr8guy]

I split my 3THs evenly between the 3 biggest pools (GHash.io, BTCGuild and Eligius) to reduce my variance. This way I get a fair share of 70% of all blocks mined.

There just isn't enough time left before mining becomes unprofitable for the home miner. And I don't have the patience to spend days on a single pool when they are going through a long stretch of terrible luck.  Otherwise I'd mine at Bitminter.  

How much did you spend on all that equipment?
And how much bitcoins have you earned, and are you expecting to earn?
I am very interested in buying some mining equipment to.
Can you give me some advise pls, on what to buy and if 3 Th's is even enough?

I hate to say this but I think it's just too late in the game to start buying new gear.  I still have some preorders yet to be delivered but I'm not buying any more miners now.  The current preorder queues are just way too long to even consider.  The only current ASIC available without a preorder that's worth considering is the BitMain S1 AntMiner.

My 3THs is only bringing in about .6 per day at the current difficulty and in about 6 days that number will go down another ~20%.

I didn't actually spend too much fiat to buy my miners.  I just reinvested my BTC back into purchasing new gear.  My BTC wallet is a bit light now because I went a bit nuts at TigerDirect and spent almost $10,000 on some new toys, lol.  Now I'm just riding the storm out and will probably quit mining in about 6 months when I shut off the last of my miners.

I'll probably start selling off the less efficient miners very soon.  I don't expect to get much now for the old stuff like BFL Singles and ASICMiner Blades but I don't want to be running them when the weather gets warmer.

[Tegija]

i have been mining for a round about 1 year and since i have several miners i have been testing different pools (ghash.io/cex.io, btcguild, eligius, slush, bitminter, 50btc and p2pool). some of them function stabile and good, some of them are because of different reasons pretty oft (uptime of 90-95% is not enough for me) down.

in long terms p2pool is the best of all: highest payouts, no DDoS attacks, instant payouts, low or 0 fees.

long time it was difficult to find stabile p2pool node, but you always have a possibility to put a other node to failover and you are absolute secure that your shares are secure. Now there are already several really professional set up nodes and trough those you even will get better payouts.

it should here not to be advertising for my own node, but i worked out my node settings in last 3 weeks and tested it parallel with other nodes and even with fee 1% i get better payouts than with many other nodes. of course there are many same good or comparable nodes, but since i have ordered myself almost 20 TH/s hashing power wich should arrive in next weeks, i decided to go on with my own node.

About 1% fee: at least half of it will be spent to p2pool developers, so with hashing in my node you can support development of all peer-to-peer mining network.

if you would like to test other nodes in p2pool network i give here for you one list of p2pool public nodes: p2pool-nodes.info

Happy mining!