Why Do Large Bitcoin Miners Still Choose Foundry USA Pool? :-\

[dingominer]

We recently moved around 550 PH/s of SHA-256 hashrate and have been analyzing different Bitcoin mining pools, including Foundry USA Pool.

One thing we are still trying to understand is why many miners continue choosing Foundry, considering that their fees seem relatively high and, in some comparisons, the net rewards can appear lower than what other pools are offering.

For those who are currently mining with Foundry, or have mined there before:

Why did you choose Foundry?
Are you staying because of reliability, payout consistency, institutional trust, compliance, reporting, support, or something else?
Have your real net rewards been better there compared to Luxor, AntPool, ViaBTC, Braiins, Binance Pool, etc.?

This is not meant as criticism. We are genuinely trying to understand the practical reasons from miners who have real experience with Foundry, especially at larger hashrate levels.

Any honest feedback would be appreciated.
 

[philipma1957]

We recently moved around 550 PH/s of SHA-256 hashrate and have been analyzing different Bitcoin mining pools, including Foundry USA Pool.

One thing we are still trying to understand is why many miners continue choosing Foundry, considering that their fees seem relatively high and, in some comparisons, the net rewards can appear lower than what other pools are offering.

For those who are currently mining with Foundry, or have mined there before:

Why did you choose Foundry?
Are you staying because of reliability, payout consistency, institutional trust, compliance, reporting, support, or something else?
Have your real net rewards been better there compared to Luxor, AntPool, ViaBTC, Braiins, Binance Pool, etc.?

This is not meant as criticism. We are genuinely trying to understand the practical reasons from miners who have real experience with Foundry, especially at larger hashrate levels.

Any honest feedback would be appreciated.
 

Most people on bitcointalk don't have enough hash to mine at Foundry.

I spoke with them 2021 I had 4ph back then I needed 20ph to join them.

So I stayed with viabtc.com

[mikeywith]

Basically, you are asking why many miners are stupid, and you make perfect sense. However, you are making the assumption that those who decide which pool to join actually own the gears and have a skin in the game, but no, the majority of today's mining is done using other investors's money. The guy in charge of choosing a pool is either

1- care only about about his own profit or whichever pool cuts him the best deal for bringing in a massive hashrate.
2- don't understand how mining works so they'd rather be 'safe' and go with a large known pool to guarantee income.
3- they are just plain stupid.
4- all of the above.

Now let's assume that all pools are honest about their fees, in that case, choosing the pool with the lowest fee would most certainly and without a single doubt give you the most reward. despite variance.

If I had 550ph and didn't care much about variance, I would go with something like kano which has only a 0.5% fee. With your hashrate, the pool will find a block every 13 days on average, despite the higher expected variance. Compare that to Antpool's 2.5%; you are going to save 2% on fees. This is 0.0045 BTC a day for your hashrate, which is $342 a day or $10,200 a month. Obviously this assumes AntPool or whichever pool is in question is even remotely honest, which is doubtful.

But before you get too excited, you are going to have to ask yourself, do you care enough about the business to save 10k a month with some variance? Does the investor or your boss or whoever you have to answer to understand how Bitcoin works? Is this your own setup, and you don't have to explain to anyone why that 3 BTC hasn't hit their wallet for 30 days straight and that the next week you may hit 3 blocks?