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?

[FP91G]

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.
 

I would never choose a pool with KYC.
I want to say that with 10 ASICs you are not interesting for large pools, but if you have 10,000 ASICs or more, then you will always get the best conditions for mining and profitable commissions. This is the whole secret of large-scale mining, when a large player earns more from 1 ASIC than a small miner.

[hashradar]

A lot of large miners probably stay with Foundry because of operational stability and institutional trust, not just because of fee percentage. 

For bigger farms, a few hours of downtime, payout instability or weak support can easily cost more than a lower pool fee saves. Reporting, infrastructure and predictability matter a lot at scale.

That said, I think  more miners are starting to compare actual net profitability instead of advertised fees alone. The difference between pools can sometimes be surprisingly large when you compare real sat/PH/day over time.

[FP91G]

A lot of large miners probably stay with Foundry because of operational stability and institutional trust, not just because of fee percentage. 

For bigger farms, a few hours of downtime, payout instability or weak support can easily cost more than a lower pool fee saves. Reporting, infrastructure and predictability matter a lot at scale.

That said, I think  more miners are starting to compare actual net profitability instead of advertised fees alone. The difference between pools can sometimes be surprisingly large when you compare real sat/PH/day over time.

Over the long term, you will have the same profit on the pools. Due to luck, you can see the hares within 1 month. Previously, it was a trend to compare monthly income on several pools with the same hashrate. But this experiment also has many technical nuances regarding ping.

But KYC on a mining pool is already too much for an ordinary miner. I'd rather get 1% less profit on another pool.

[hashradar]

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.
 

One thing that surprised me while comparing pools is how often miners focus on advertised fees while paying much less attention to actual profitability over time.

I've been using HashRadar to compare some of the larger pools side by side, and the gap between fee percentage and real returns is sometimes bigger than I expected.

I'd still be interested to hear from people running serious hashrate on Foundry. Was the deciding factor profitability, or something else entirely?

[hashradar]

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?

That's actually a really interesting point.

The math may favor one option, but the decision isn't always made by the person who understands the math.

For larger operations, predictability is often easier to explain than variance, even if the expected return is slightly lower.

I'm curious how many large farms here optimize for maximum expected profitability versus minimizing operational and reporting headaches.

[DaveF]

The other thing is probably what I would file in the big heading of support and offerings that we don't even see as small miners.

Will they get a dedicated stratum server that only you talk to?

Can you get dedicated fiber from your mining location to their server location to avoid routing across the public internet (faster / more reliable)

If there is an issue with something, how well & how much will they work with you to figure out what is wrong.

And so on.

Also, things like this:

Years and years ago, a client that I did some work with, that had a for the time, a massive mine.
 
The pool they were mining to actually put in a couple of dedicated stratum servers at their location so instead of talking to the public ones on the internet they spoke to ones on their local network. Also allowed the pool to put in a couple of other servers that the pool did put on public IPs so the they could said they had a NY stratum node. But, once again people would look at them and ask why they mined at pool "X" with a stupid high fee. The public answer was "because". The real answer was they were paying a fraction of that fee, while only talking to stratum servers on their private network.

So in the end, we don't know what we don't know and we really don't know what (if any) deals have been made with large miners talking to large pools.


-Dave

[FP91G]

The other thing is probably what I would file in the big heading of support and offerings that we don't even see as small miners.

Will they get a dedicated stratum server that only you talk to?

Can you get dedicated fiber from your mining location to their server location to avoid routing across the public internet (faster / more reliable)

If there is an issue with something, how well & how much will they work with you to figure out what is wrong.

And so on.

Also, things like this:

Years and years ago, a client that I did some work with, that had a for the time, a massive mine.
 
The pool they were mining to actually put in a couple of dedicated stratum servers at their location so instead of talking to the public ones on the internet they spoke to ones on their local network. Also allowed the pool to put in a couple of other servers that the pool did put on public IPs so the they could said they had a NY stratum node. But, once again people would look at them and ask why they mined at pool "X" with a stupid high fee. The public answer was "because". The real answer was they were paying a fraction of that fee, while only talking to stratum servers on their private network.

So in the end, we don't know what we don't know and we really don't know what (if any) deals have been made with large miners talking to large pools.


-Dave

It’s as if this company was not engaged in mining, but in trading and won ahead of its competitors in milliseconds.
If you mine on a pool in shared mode, then a ping of up to 50 milliseconds is enough, but on a good fiber-optic connection a large miner will have a minimal ping.
They probably had an economic calculation of how much more the pool would process the ball from each millisecond won. I've never seen such calculations, but I don't work for a large miner.

[DaveF]

It’s as if this company was not engaged in mining, but in trading and won ahead of its competitors in milliseconds.
If you mine on a pool in shared mode, then a ping of up to 50 milliseconds is enough, but on a good fiber-optic connection a large miner will have a minimal ping.
They probably had an economic calculation of how much more the pool would process the ball from each millisecond won. I've never seen such calculations, but I don't work for a large miner.

It was not even ping times, they didn't even have to worry about packet loss or routing issues or anything like that.
And, the pool ate the cost to keep their multiple connections back to their HQ.

In theory the mine didn't even need internet access since all servers they talked to were on local 10.0.x.x. network.
In reality they did have internet for failover if the local nodes where having an issue but not for anything else.

-Dave

[FP91G]

It’s as if this company was not engaged in mining, but in trading and won ahead of its competitors in milliseconds.
If you mine on a pool in shared mode, then a ping of up to 50 milliseconds is enough, but on a good fiber-optic connection a large miner will have a minimal ping.
They probably had an economic calculation of how much more the pool would process the ball from each millisecond won. I've never seen such calculations, but I don't work for a large miner.

It was not even ping times, they didn't even have to worry about packet loss or routing issues or anything like that.
And, the pool ate the cost to keep their multiple connections back to their HQ.

In theory the mine didn't even need internet access since all servers they talked to were on local 10.0.x.x. network.
In reality they did have internet for failover if the local nodes where having an issue but not for anything else.

-Dave

I consider this a rare and isolated case. It's ideal, but most miners can't afford it.
Can you explain to me the financial benefits of a pool and a miner in practice?
I don't think this is about saving on internet service.

[DaveF]

It’s as if this company was not engaged in mining, but in trading and won ahead of its competitors in milliseconds.
If you mine on a pool in shared mode, then a ping of up to 50 milliseconds is enough, but on a good fiber-optic connection a large miner will have a minimal ping.
They probably had an economic calculation of how much more the pool would process the ball from each millisecond won. I've never seen such calculations, but I don't work for a large miner.

It was not even ping times, they didn't even have to worry about packet loss or routing issues or anything like that.
And, the pool ate the cost to keep their multiple connections back to their HQ.

In theory the mine didn't even need internet access since all servers they talked to were on local 10.0.x.x. network.
In reality they did have internet for failover if the local nodes where having an issue but not for anything else.

-Dave

I consider this a rare and isolated case. It's ideal, but most miners can't afford it.
Can you explain to me the financial benefits of a pool and a miner in practice?
I don't think this is about saving on internet service.

For the pool, they got a nice data center to put their stratum servers in and all it cost them was the difference in the fee they charged the rest of the world vs what these guys were paying.

For the miner, they got local stratum servers so no worrying about internet outages, slowdowns or routing issues.

Not much more then that. The pool paid for their own multiple routes back to their other locations.

Keep in mind although a lot of pools were and are putting their stratum servers in the cloud, a decade ago many still had their own servers in certain locations.

It also worked quite well for both of them at the time.

No different then now with having Netflix having massive caching servers in the data centers that cable & fios providers use.

-Dave

[FP91G]

It’s as if this company was not engaged in mining, but in trading and won ahead of its competitors in milliseconds.
If you mine on a pool in shared mode, then a ping of up to 50 milliseconds is enough, but on a good fiber-optic connection a large miner will have a minimal ping.
They probably had an economic calculation of how much more the pool would process the ball from each millisecond won. I've never seen such calculations, but I don't work for a large miner.

It was not even ping times, they didn't even have to worry about packet loss or routing issues or anything like that.
And, the pool ate the cost to keep their multiple connections back to their HQ.

In theory the mine didn't even need internet access since all servers they talked to were on local 10.0.x.x. network.
In reality they did have internet for failover if the local nodes where having an issue but not for anything else.

-Dave

I consider this a rare and isolated case. It's ideal, but most miners can't afford it.
Can you explain to me the financial benefits of a pool and a miner in practice?
I don't think this is about saving on internet service.

For the pool, they got a nice data center to put their stratum servers in and all it cost them was the difference in the fee they charged the rest of the world vs what these guys were paying.

For the miner, they got local stratum servers so no worrying about internet outages, slowdowns or routing issues.

Not much more then that. The pool paid for their own multiple routes back to their other locations.

Keep in mind although a lot of pools were and are putting their stratum servers in the cloud, a decade ago many still had their own servers in certain locations.

It also worked quite well for both of them at the time.

No different then now with having Netflix having massive caching servers in the data centers that cable & fios providers use.

-Dave

The idea was great at the time, and it made sense when servers were far away. But now, each pool has multiple servers in different countries, giving miners a good, fast connection to the server.
Cloud technologies are also very helpful these days for scalability and load balancing, allowing you to quickly add servers wherever needed.

[samadam007]

We've been mining on Foundry with a good chunk of our hashrate for over a year now.
We chose them mainly for reliability and stability.At large scale, even a few hours of downtime or high stale shares can cost way more than slightly higher fees. Their FPPS payouts are very consistent and predictable, which helps a lot with cash flow and planning.
We also like the institutional grade support, clean reporting, and compliance... important for our operation. Fees look a bit higher on paper, but in practice our net rewards have been competitive with Luxor, AntPool, and ViaBTC after factoring in uptime, low rejections, and smooth operations.

We have tested others and keep coming back because it just works with minimal headaches. For serious large scale mining, the peace of mind is worth it.

[FP91G]

We've been mining on Foundry with a good chunk of our hashrate for over a year now.
We chose them mainly for reliability and stability.At large scale, even a few hours of downtime or high stale shares can cost way more than slightly higher fees. Their FPPS payouts are very consistent and predictable, which helps a lot with cash flow and planning.
We also like the institutional grade support, clean reporting, and compliance... important for our operation. Fees look a bit higher on paper, but in practice our net rewards have been competitive with Luxor, AntPool, and ViaBTC after factoring in uptime, low rejections, and smooth operations.

We have tested others and keep coming back because it just works with minimal headaches. For serious large scale mining, the peace of mind is worth it.

Not every pool can afford FPPS; typically, only large mining pools that find blocks consistently and predictably every day offer such modes.
Could you tell me how your profit is currently?
A regular Antminer S21 (200Th/s) at 5 cents yields very little profit, but I'm mining alone. How is your company surviving now?

[PX-Z]

I would never choose a pool with KYC.
I want to say that with 10 ASICs you are not interesting for large pools, but if you have 10,000 ASICs or more, then you will always get the best conditions for mining and profitable commissions. This is the whole secret of large-scale mining, when a large player earns more from 1 ASIC than a small miner.

It's an operating business, and if they want to operate legally, basically they will ask whoever they will be partnered with (those miners), if they are legally operating as a business too, or just anonymous miners. So, yes, KYC and business docs will be required on such setup.

[samadam007]

We've been mining on Foundry with a good chunk of our hashrate for over a year now.
We chose them mainly for reliability and stability.At large scale, even a few hours of downtime or high stale shares can cost way more than slightly higher fees. Their FPPS payouts are very consistent and predictable, which helps a lot with cash flow and planning.
We also like the institutional grade support, clean reporting, and compliance... important for our operation. Fees look a bit higher on paper, but in practice our net rewards have been competitive with Luxor, AntPool, and ViaBTC after factoring in uptime, low rejections, and smooth operations.

We have tested others and keep coming back because it just works with minimal headaches. For serious large scale mining, the peace of mind is worth it.

Not every pool can afford FPPS; typically, only large mining pools that find blocks consistently and predictably every day offer such modes.
Could you tell me how your profit is currently?
A regular Antminer S21 (200Th/s) at 5 cents yields very little profit, but I'm mining alone. How is your company surviving now?

You're right... FPPS needs big scale and steady block finds, which is why mainly large pools like Foundry offer it.
For a single S21 (200 TH/s) at 5¢ power, profit is very tight right now ($2-4/day after everything, dependng on efficiency). Many small miners are just breaking even or hodling BTC.
At our scale, we do well on Foundry because of excellent uptime, low rejects, and reliable payouts. This beats chasing slightly lower fees elsewhere.

[FP91G]

We've been mining on Foundry with a good chunk of our hashrate for over a year now.
We chose them mainly for reliability and stability.At large scale, even a few hours of downtime or high stale shares can cost way more than slightly higher fees. Their FPPS payouts are very consistent and predictable, which helps a lot with cash flow and planning.
We also like the institutional grade support, clean reporting, and compliance... important for our operation. Fees look a bit higher on paper, but in practice our net rewards have been competitive with Luxor, AntPool, and ViaBTC after factoring in uptime, low rejections, and smooth operations.

We have tested others and keep coming back because it just works with minimal headaches. For serious large scale mining, the peace of mind is worth it.

Not every pool can afford FPPS; typically, only large mining pools that find blocks consistently and predictably every day offer such modes.
Could you tell me how your profit is currently?
A regular Antminer S21 (200Th/s) at 5 cents yields very little profit, but I'm mining alone. How is your company surviving now?

You're right... FPPS needs big scale and steady block finds, which is why mainly large pools like Foundry offer it.
For a single S21 (200 TH/s) at 5¢ power, profit is very tight right now ($2-4/day after everything, dependng on efficiency). Many small miners are just breaking even or hodling BTC.
At our scale, we do well on Foundry because of excellent uptime, low rejects, and reliable payouts. This beats chasing slightly lower fees elsewhere.

It's great that you have favorable terms with the mining pool and reliable operation, but a miner's main expense is always electricity. My expenses: probably over 90% is electricity, and the rest is transportation and repair costs.
What's your current tariff, if I may ask, and what are your plans after the halving?
If the BTC price doesn't increase, any modern equipment will be unprofitable at 5 cents.