How to Choose a Mining Pool

The purpose of a bitcoin mining pool is for a group of miners to join together and form a pool. By combining resources from all clients in that pool, they increase the odds of discovering the solution to a given block. When a solution is found to the block, it rewards the newly issued coin to the pool owner. The pool owner then divides the coins between the miners based on their contribution.

• Pooled mining produces a constant revenue of smaller values, whereas solo mining tends to be more erratic and could take years to mine one block.

• Pooled mining can generate a 1–2% higher income (before fees, if any) due to long polling provided by the pools. Solo mining wastes time due to only supporting getwork pull.

When looking for the right mining pool to join, your goal is to find a fair pool that you can trust to provide you with optimal payouts in exchange for your time and energy resources. Though, the pool you choose, statistically, will not increase or decrease your odds. Choosing the right pool can greatly increase your overall earnings.

10 things to consider when choosing a pool

Reputation

Join a group and see what others are saying about any pool before joining it. You will get the best information from miners who have already tried the pool themselves.

Pool Fee’s

Most pool’s charge a fee everytime a block is discovered. For the highest payout over time finding a reliable pool with the lowest fees is crucial. When making your decision, start with considering pools with no fee at all.

Uptime Efficiency

Do the research before committing to a pool. Make sure they have an uptime of 99.5% or higher, check to see if the pool supports backup servers in the case an outage.

Support and Feedback

It’s important that a pool has an open line for support and feedback in case you encounter technical issues or notice any discrepancy in your payout.

Location/Latency

Choose a pool running on a server near you. If your computer takes to long to communicate with the pools server you will lose precious shares. Shares received after a block change, intended for the previous block, are considered stale and not counted.