The pool for mining is a platform for mining crypto currency by the joint efforts of the miners. Connecting with increasing complexity of mining, it is becoming same increasingly difficult to carry out this work alone. Greatest difficulty is with bitcoin mining. Therefore, it was for bitcoin that first mining pools were created. The pool has a much greater chance to contribute the generation of a block. But the profit in the pool is distributed to all participants. In addition, the pool takes a fee. By now, there are more than one and a half thousand pools and new ones are constantly appearing. The miner has a growing choice – and the complexity of choice grows too. Before joining the pool, you will have to calculate your abilities well and carefully study the conditions of the pool. Old pools are proud of their practice, experience and proven reliability for years. But the new one offer more attractive options.
Pools are mainly created for the most popular coins – primarily BTC and ETH. And bitcoin pools are incomparably larger than all the others, if even to take them together. Therefore, there are quite acceptable tools for monitoring bitcoin pools. There are BLOCKCHAIN is headquartered in Luxembourg and Chinese Bitmain . The second company also manages the largest bitcoin mining pools Antpool.com, BTC.com. But here, objective statistics are provided both for their own pools and for the market.
When joining the pool, it is desirable to evaluate:
- Your capabilities (your equipment hashtrait ).
- Pool power – the more powerful the pool, the more likely it is to earn money, but the less you get as a share.
- The way payments are distributed is also important. Now more than 10 such methods are offered. The Bitcoin Wiki shows 12: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison_of_mining_pools
The most popular and well-known reward methods are:
- Proportional: It is as simple as the proportionality theorem. The more share you find, the more you get paid.
- PPS (Pay Per Share): A fixed sum is given to you for every share you submit.
- PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares): This method of payment is akin to the proportional method with one minor adjustment. A single share owned by you can be rewarded on several rounds.
- Score Based: Similar to a proportional system of payment with one minor adjustment. It also involves the ‘time’ factor. More the number of shares you submit in the minimum time period, the more score you receive.
The most popular coins for mining are:
- Bitcoin,
- Dogecoin (based on Litecoin),
- Dash,
- Monero,
- Ethereum.
It is clear why Bitcoin and Ether. The rest – in the hope of their growth, mostly.
The most popular pools for today:
In front of volatility of cryptology, multi-pools become more attractive. This pool allows you to automatically switch from one type of currency to another, depending on its profitability. Usually many parameters are taken into account: the exchange rate, the complexity of each currency etc. Once a certain type of currency becomes the most profitable, the pool automatically begins to mine it. Of course, it remains possible to turn off the automation and adjust the mining of one or two specific coins.
Now, in the falling market, interest in the Ether has slightly decreased, many miners turned to bitcoin. But in the long run, of course, Ether promises great profitability and generally offers more opportunities. To monitor the ETH mining pools, too, there are tools, the most popular is the universal Investoon (https://investoon.com/mining_pools/eth).
Popular ETH mining pools:
- Ethermine is the oldest and most famous pool, with about 130K users, instant payouts, minimum payout of 0.05 ETH, 1% fee.
- Ethpool pays the all amount of reward to the miner who made the biggest contribution to the extraction of the block.
- Nanopool includes about 85K of miners, takes a fee same as Ethermine, 1%. The minimum payment is 0.2 ETH.
It is for the Ether that new pools are created and offer increasingly advanced options and tools. One of the new – WHALESBURG – with registration in Czech Republic. The project successfully held a tokensale, continue developing and ready to offer miners a set of different tiers when joining the pool. As the CEO of Whalesburg, Evgeny Kitkin says: “While developing, we found a lot of bottlenecks in the mining polls. A lot of imperfections were found and corrected. Other pools do not even try to do such work.” The Whalesburg platform, as the developers emphasize, provides additional profitability to the miners and is versatile – it is an operating system for mining, a mining pool and a cloud solution. Without specifically advertising this project, it is worth noting that it is in this direction that new pools are developing, providing additional tools for monitoring, rating, analytics, as well as proprietary algorithms for switching from coin to coin.
