Binance Pool (Avoid Like The Plague)

[mikeywith]

So I decided to give Binance pool a shot and see how they do, and the experience wasn't the best I had.

First of all the user interface is quite annoying with little statistics, no monitoring application and overall nothing but basic features, but wasn't a much of a problem, until I suddenly noticed some weird stuff going on, the first time it happened a few days ago, total hashrate on the pool dropped about 30% on two different subaccounts, I checked the miners that were showing 0 hashrate on the pool they were mining just fine with shares getting accepted on Binance pool.

I contacted their support through live-chat and then while they were collecting information from me, I refreshed the page and everything was back to normal, a sudden increase from about 350th to 500th on one account and 250th to 350th on another.

The support told me "nobody reported such an incident" so indirectly suggesting that it's a problem on my side and provided me with the "technical team" email for further support, of course, I was lazy to go through all the trouble and just ignored it.

Mind you that the two accounts use different miners that are located in different geographical locations, with both farms having other gears mining to different pools and at the time of the hashrate drop on Binance pool every other miner on every other pool was hashing normally without a problem.

The strange thing is that they weren't showing offline/inactive, they were active at 0th.

Last night, as usual, I was checking the hashrate on the pool and damn the same thing happened again, I quickly went to check if all miners on other pools were reporting proper hashrate, and everything was perfect, check the miners that were reporting active with 0 hashrate on Binance and they were submitting shares to Binance pool without an issue.

The funny thing is that when that happened, even the 24h hashrate would drop to 0 and the rapidly climb back up to it's the normal hashrate.

I am not suggesting that Binance planned to steal my small hashrate and mine with it for an hour or so, I just think something is wrong with their pool, I am also not totally negating the fact that somehow "magically" only certain gears that are pointed to Binance pool were having an issue and the status on the webpage and aweomseminer was wrong, but I'd give that a 0.0001% chance.

The pool does have some good features like a watch-link where you get a URL to monitor your hashrate without having to log-in, you can also directly transfer funds from your Pool wallet to Spot/Future wallets to trade it for other coins or stack it or do many of the things you can do on Binance exchange, but the disadvantages overweight the advantages of this pool and It was a short-lived experience which I will probably never have with them again.

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[minefarmbuy]

I wouldn't mine a pool from a company that continues to signal for network rollbacks when they get hacked. Also providing direct liquidity to an exchange likely contributes to a poorer market rate.

I could make assumptions on the hr drops pool and user side but would only be speculation.

[mikeywith]

I wouldn't mine a pool from a company that continues to signal for network rollbacks when they get hacked.

As far as I know, CZ didn't ask for blockchain rollback after the hack/s, he talked about how is it possible and what are the pros and cons, and he mentioned "we decided NOT to pursue the re-org approach." Source: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1125996194734399488

Also providing direct liquidity to an exchange likely contributes to a poorer market rate.

The mining wallets are separated from the exchange wallets, your mining rewards aren't tradable until you move them to your spot/future wallets, also given the fact that this is a PPS pool, it simply means the liquidity is already at their disposal, whatever they mine will go to the miner after deducting the 2.5% fees, in some cases they will be paying more than the mine, so all in all, I think this has nothing to do with market rates.

Having said that, the reason why I decided to give Binance pool a go is because I was looking for an alternative to Viabtc, while Viabtc is without a doubt one of the best PPS pools out there, the fact that it's controlled by Bitmain makes me not want to mine there, F2pool surprisingly restrict certain countries from mining, this is th reason why I would love to have a non-China based large PPS pool which sadly doesn't exist.

[minefarmbuy]

Your/others mining reward might not be but I’m referring to the pool who receives the literal coinbase tx. I understand that the rollback was considered futile after the initial calls/ statement but doesn’t make less relevant now that they are looking to pool hr, all imo of course.

I’d pump our projected payout cadence of LP but will refrain, if PPS is desired I might look at Nova a little closer.

[DaveF]

Having said that, the reason why I decided to give Binance pool a go is because I was looking for an alternative to Viabtc, while Viabtc is without a doubt one of the best PPS pools out there, the fact that it's controlled by Bitmain makes me not want to mine there, F2pool surprisingly restrict certain countries from mining, this is th reason why I would love to have a non-China based large PPS pool which sadly doesn't exist.

If you have enough hashrate to get a payment once a day does large / small PPS pool really matter?
The out of China / Hong Kong is tough.
It's not like PPLNS where you could loose weeks / months.

But, I'm guessing you had the same issue I do. Try other places wind up back at VIA.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

yeah out of 1.2ph + .58ph + .17ph + .024ph = 1.974 ph

1.95ph is on viabtc

[neutraLTC]

I wouldn't mine a pool from a company that continues to signal for network rollbacks when they get hacked. Also providing direct liquidity to an exchange likely contributes to a poorer market rate.

I could make assumptions on the hr drops pool and user side but would only be speculation.

This right here is my main concern, crazy to mine with a pool that wanted a rollback not too long ago. Even if they did backtrack, it just shows how out of touch the CEO of binance is.

[mikeywith]

If you have enough hashrate to get a payment once a day does large / small PPS pool really matter?

Most PPS+/FPPS pools are large pools anyways.

But, I'm guessing you had the same issue I do. Try other places wind up back at VIA.

Exactly, I usually try to give the new pools a chance, and for whatever reason I always find Via to be the simplest, most stable and trouble-free, It also saves me a lot of time when trying to run the numbers at the end of the week/month, what I like about it is that you get to setup sub-accounts and those sub-accounts are financially independent, each can have it's own withrawl limit and address, while this feature is simple, many PPS pools don't have it and I have to run the numbers manually because I don't put all workers on the same sub-account and I don't use the same limit/wallet, the alternative approach would be creating multiple accounts which isn't the ideal.

[Artemis3]

This right here is my main concern, crazy to mine with a pool that wanted a rollback not too long ago. Even if they did backtrack, it just shows how out of touch the CEO of binance is.

I'm more worried the next time they get hacked, they can either siphon out funds from the exchange or vice versa. They could easily play fractional reserve there. So on a fundamental level, having an exchange own a pool or vice versa is a big no. But then again the same could be said for asic manufacturers.

And yeah, it was Jihan Wu (of all people) whom advised him to drop the idea... Maybe from that conversation the idea of having a pool came about.