What and why? When your pool begins to fall behind.

[Steamtyme]

So for a few years now there have been the massive (I call them corporate) pools operating. They often ran with a PPS method and catered to people who wanted to see instant rewards and/or daily payouts. Short story is they kept more of your BTC for this. Time kept moving along and with it the Network Difficulty has risen as well. This puts some of the smaller pools and their miners in a spot; it starts small but gets worse with every increase in the Diff. You eventually fall behind and are no longer expecting to find a block within the 2016 blocks of that period.

There are lots of miners who have left shares on now dead or dying pools. When did you make the decision to either jump ship or hold your breath and why? I think the cutoff right now is a ~38 PH pool for you to expect 1 block in 2016.

While I love the idea of a bunch of smaller pools operating on the fringes, I just don't think it will viably survive into the future, especially with more mid size pools popping up providing other options to the Bitmain pools. Final thought if you were on a smaller pool if there seemed to be a movement towards consolidating into pool X, would you or would you just move into one of the large pools?

For me personally I've hit that point I told myself I would begin to make decisions. I believe I am slowly going to begin migrating some of my hashrate. I do still believe that at some point the hashrate may climb back into the safe zone, but I want to hedge my BTC earnings out a bit while Diff is still climbing slowly.

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[sidehack]

I admittedly don't have much skin in the game right now, nor have I for some years, but I'd never consider mining on a manufacturer-operated pool and especially not one Bitmain controlled. I even wrote a provision into my customers' hosting agreement that I reserved the right to block access to pools whose operation was dangerous or detrimental to the network. All my stuff either points at Kano or ckpool. Those guys don't suck.

[philipma1957]

The curse of growing your hashrate in most cases is higher power costs.

Even if you have a 4 cent rate  with all s17 pros 

  a 1 ph miner burns  about 40-44 watts 20 units x 50-53 = 1.00 to 1.06ph.
and 20 x 2225 = 44500 watts.
1 ph is not enough to help hit a lot of blocks.  So the math  is 0.04 x 44.5 x 720 = 1281 usd a month along with  20 x 3000 = 60000 bill or higher to buy the units.

a 10 ph pool hits a block every 55 days.  but going 110 days is going to happen around every 7th block.

I burn about 3000 usd in power in a month  and  collect about .6 btc along with 6 ltc each and every month.

I never worry about hit a block. And I am paid daily.  It is very hard  to convince myself to move to any pool under 0.5% hashrate.   
1.0% is 830ph
0 .5% is 415ph

When I had smaller power bills It was not an issue.
When I had 1 partner it was not an issue.
with current power deal
the hoster
his son
buysolar
and me.

Makes it hard to not be on a no variance pool.

Personally I am think of taking off all next year I need a vacation. Tired of all the drama. Worry about a lot of shit and I do not earn a ton of money doing this.

[Steamtyme]

I admittedly don't have much skin in the game right now, nor have I for some years, but I'd never consider mining on a manufacturer-operated pool and especially not one Bitmain controlled. I even wrote a provision into my customers' hosting agreement that I reserved the right to block access to pools whose operation was dangerous or detrimental to the network. All my stuff either points at Kano or ckpool. Those guys don't suck.

Wow I wish more hosting centers had thought of that little provision, it would probably be a drastically different landscape. I did at one time suggest to some of the manufacturers that they include an insert with their hardware that would promote the benefits of mining at some of the lesser known pools and prevent their gear from mining and supporting Bitmain. No one ran with it though.

Makes it hard to not be on a no variance pool. Personally I am think of taking off all next year I need a vacation. Tired of all the drama. Worry about a lot of shit and I do not earn a ton of money doing this.

You are actually one of the people I thought about, I remember you used to spread the hash and rentals on a few pools. I haven't grown insane but I'm doing okay for being strictly out of my house. I'm just at the point where I want to accumulate the BTC, and variance can be a bitch. Assuming of course your on the unlucky side of things.
I say you make it about 2 weeks before you'd have another project on the go, lol. Especially if a bunch of new gear launched.

[wndsnb]

At the moment my power/hosting bills are low enough that I don't need regular payouts. Right now I'm actually not selling any BTC to cover my bills, but I'm ramping up to the point where I'll need to by the end of the year. My plan is to keep on Kano as long as they remain high enough to average around a block a month. I'll still be able to float 3 months without an issue, but if it gets much longer I'll move whatever % is needed to cover the bills to a larger pool.

If everyone just put the minimum % required into the pps pools to cover the bills, then this wouldn't be an issue.

[philipma1957]

At the moment my power/hosting bills are low enough that I don't need regular payouts. Right now I'm actually not selling any BTC to cover my bills, but I'm ramping up to the point where I'll need to by the end of the year. My plan is to keep on Kano as long as they remain high enough to average around a block a month. I'll still be able to float 3 months without an issue, but if it gets much longer I'll move whatever % is needed to cover the bills to a larger pool.

If everyone just put the minimum % required into the pps pools to cover the bills, then this wouldn't be an issue.

I used to do Kano and viabtc when it was just me and buysolar and we were burning 20kwatts.

But when you burn 100kwatts it comes to 72000 kwatts a month at 4 cents or so is 3000 a month.

Since the hosters deal is 1/2 the coins he gets .3btc and 3ltc a month that is a small profit for him at the moment. He did not buy any gear. So he has little to lose. But it pretty much forces me to use viabtc.

I finally paid everything off. So I get .3 btc and 3ltc to split with buysolar.

Around 3350 a month all profit. All gear paid for.  So sept oct nov dec would be close to

6700 for buysolar and 6700 for me.

Of course with diff moving up it will be closer to 4000 each.

[wndsnb]

You could move some % of the hashrate to the smaller pool, then calculate the 50% going to the host from the hashrate still going to viabtc. Nothing changes for the host, but you get some more freedom to use the pools of your choice.

So if you moved 25% to kano leaving 75% on viabtc, host would get 66.7% of the rewards from viabtc.

[philipma1957]

I would like to point 100th to mmpool.org  as I have 1.1 btc in prior credit that would be rewarded to me. If They were to hit a block.

Finding the warehouse deal allowed us to have a lot more gear. But it is more of a business and I have multiple decisions to do.  I am not a hobby miner but I am still only small scale miner as a business.

Funny spot to be in 900th is nice but not enough.
I may order new bitmain gear on the 9th.

[Steamtyme]

I would like to point 100th to mmpool.org  as I have 1.1 btc in prior credit that would be rewarded to me. If They were to hit a block.

That's where I remembered you mentioning the shares were sitting. Any particular reason you chose ViaBTC over others? Or was it just that you could also point the LTC gear there as well?
I'm curious did you put it all in the steady eanings of their PPS+ at 4% fees or PPLNS at 2% fees.

[Philipma1957cellphone]

pps+  pays 96% of the block and 98% of tx fees. So I use pps+.  I used viabtc because we can do both ltc and btc and because they charge only 2% of tx fee.

[wndsnb]

I'm sure there are a lot of miners that would rather use the smaller pool if the pool hashrate was high enough to average a block a week.

What would be great is if there was a site that would allow users to set multiple pools with priority and pool hashrate threshold, or average time to find a block threshold. This would allow you mine at the larger pool, but commit hashrate to a smaller pool if the pool hashrate goes above your threshold. The combined hashrate of all users that committed hashrate below your threshold to the same pool is used to determine if your threshold is satisfied.

[philipma1957]

Having mined at small pools a block every 3 days is good.

Since  that is 144 x 3 = 432 as the ‘norm’. So that is 1/432 x 83,000 ph

About 200 ph is good.

Your norm is 10 blocks in a month. Which means you should get enough blocks to pay the power bill.

If the pool is 20 ph and the norm is 1 block per month it is not difficult to go blockless for two months and have a power bill issue.

[mikeywith]

Your concern is valid, I have made my decision a long time ago when I decided to take mining as a business and not just a hobby, therefore, it only makes sense to mine at large pools, I tried almost all large/mid pools and found out that recently and for now viabtc with pps+ option is the best for me, when and if I grow my hashrate to a good extent whereby I get to the point that my hasharate will really help a small pool hit block in a very reasonable time frame then all of this could change, but since this is not the case now I rather be on the safe side.

Personally I am think of taking off all next year I need a vacation. Tired of all the drama. Worry about a lot of shit and I do not earn a ton of money doing this.

    this drama comes from having partners to deal with i suppose?  I can relate

[philipma1957]

Your concern is valid, I have made my decision a long time ago when I decided to take mining as a business and not just a hobby, therefore, it only makes sense to mine at large pools, I tried almost all large/mid pools and found out that recently and for now viabtc with pps+ option is the best for me, when and if I grow my hashrate to a good extent whereby I get to the point that my hasharate will really help a small pool hit block in a very reasonable time frame then all of this could change, but since this is not the case now I rather be on the safe side.

Personally I am think of taking off all next year I need a vacation. Tired of all the drama. Worry about a lot of shit and I do not earn a ton of money doing this.

    this drama comes from having partners to deal with i suppose?  I can relate

well  I like my partners.

But  I changed my business model to join them.

I sold well cared for gear  mostly here on bitcointalk.
I gave good deals and it was a working model for years.
USA changed  some tax laws and my model simply generates way too much paperwork to be worth doing.

So  just mining would be good but having 4 of us to think of is different model for me.  I am not used to it.

And going back to my old way  won't work due to new usa tax laws.

So  selling off my piece of the farm  getting all my taxes corrected for 2018 and 2019  will take until 2020 oct or nov.

I do not want any crypto activity for that time.

[Steamtyme]

Your concern is valid, I have made my decision a long time ago when I decided to take mining as a business and not just a hobby, therefore, it only makes sense to mine at large pools, I tried almost all large/mid pools and found out that recently and for now viabtc with pps+ option is the best for me, when and if I grow my hashrate to a good extent whereby I get to the point that my hasharate will really help a small pool hit block in a very reasonable time frame then all of this could change, but since this is not the case now I rather be on the safe side.

Yeah I'm still no where near looking at it like a business, but it's the same none the less. When I got into this I made the choice to mine for my BTC instead of outright buying. I've rolled mostly everything right back into gear and am now looking to accumulate. So for now I've moved about 80% of my hashrate. Still doing PPLNS, and large enough to have a fairly consistent reward. For my size the more than double pool fee is something I can live with.
I don't ever expect to be big enough to make a consistent impact on a pool. It would just be nice to see a wider range of smaller options.

So  selling off my piece of the farm  getting all my taxes corrected for 2018 and 2019  will take until 2020 oct or nov.

Wow, really considering getting completely out of mining? Even for a year I'm surprised.

[philipma1957]

Yeah  I do not want tax exposure for 2020.

My 2018 return is almost fixed and ready to turn in.  I will send it in Oct 1-15

My 2019 return will be delayed until Oct 1-15 2020.

And I will know by Feb or March of 2021  if I pleased the feds.

So all of 2020 I will hodl  some coins.

I will still post. But I won't be mining or selling gear.

[wndsnb]

The crypto tax situation here in the US is ridiculous... my goal is to get my 2018 (and 2017) taxes filed before the Oct. deadline....

I paid for one of the online crypto tax services and it makes everything a lot easier, worth every penny.

[philipma1957]

Yeah I have the service myself. Without it I could never do the returns.

I am also waiting for the 2020 election.

Not that I am pro trump or anti trump but I think he has made a lot of moves that are hard on crypto in general.

There are a few dems that seem to be able to do crypto like France 🇫🇷 or Portugal 🇵🇹.

Having coin to coin exchanges with out reporting = very good.

[BitcoinIntern]

How did the tax laws change again for miners?