hey again,
what is the difference or benefit of joining a pool with a fee as opposed to a pool with no fee?
I don't mine CGA, because I have an ASIC device rather than a scrypt mining rig. So this is generic rather than specific to CGA. Most of my bitcoin mining has been at a zero fee pool, Eligius, where I still donate 1 percent because the guy running it is a fuckin' hero.
On alts, I always make sure that I'm either mining for a fee or I have a set donation. I'm a small timer, so it's usually one percent. My reasoning behind this is that something you pay for has more value to you, and to the vendor. If something goes wrong, I want the pool op to be making something off of the venture so that he has skin in the game. Eligius is the only exception I would make, and that based solely on my experience. And I do pay them
I have mined at a couple of zero fee pools. They either sat on my coins for a really long time, or were just generally unmaintained. Fee based pools tend to, in my opinion, be more apt to customer service. Cuz if you go elsewhere, they lose.
YMMV.
p.s. I'm not far from where you are right now in my crypto journey
All this was very new to me not long ago. Welcome to the Digital Frontier!
For a different coin,
I have seen a corrupt pool owner advertise zero fee, so a lot of miners joined that pool from launch, it became the largest pool.
When I started mining that coin, I made payout calculations and saw that I was missing more than 50% of expected payouts.
So, I switched to another pool (which is still in my signature) and saw my payouts double.
This means that this "zero fee" pool was actually more than 50% fee, but without telling you and not showing it.
Most likely (from what I can see) is that they "inflated" the number of shares generated by creating some "ghost" miners that
did not actually generate any work, but were representing large hash rate and more than half the nr of shares.
I noticed that this pool had between 8 and 10 anonymous miners, all with very similar hash rate (within a few percent of each other) which represented over 50% of the pool hash rate. Also, the block finding rate of that pool was too low - pointing at the fact that less than half their claimed hash rate and shares were actual work done by miners finding blocks.
This means that more than half the payouts of those blocks were kept by the pool operator since he never needed to pay out
to the ghost miners...
You can only find this scam by calculating expected payout and comparing it to actual. This is assuming that the pool SW
is running well - some pools have too low payout but that has nothing to do with this problem.
Concluding:
I am OK mining with a pool charging 1% or so fee, so he does not need to steal from the miners (although there are a few good pools with true zero fee, because they are run by hobbyists who like to run a pool for the community)
As always - do your due diligence and know where you truely get a "free lunch".