Hello
Have a question.
What should I consider when chosing a mining pool?. I have a S7 B2 on its way to my house. It should be delivered on thursday and this is my first miner.
I have been reading about the different methods each pool work (PPS, PPLNS, DGM, SMPPS, etc...) and also we can find several pools on each method. Which method and which pool do you think work better and why? If two given pools work on PPS for example, how is that possible that one of them could have their luck on "-8%" (just saying something), I thought statiscally both of them should be "the same thing" (of course according to their each mining total power)
Do they have any trick I should take care of?
Is there anyway to measure efficiency of each mining pool without having to test each pool for several hours or days?
Thank you
Luck is just a laymans term for variance. If you mine on a pool having bad "luck" you'll earn the same BTC in the long run as a pool having good "luck". The luck on a pool just shows how fast or slow it has recently been finding blocks. Over time a pool will find the same amount of blocks to match it's hashrate, so a bigger pool doesn't earn more. A pool with 1% of the total hashrate will find 1% of blocks over time, and the payouts will be spread out over less miners than a big pool so they will earn the same over time regardless of current luck. A 1% pool can go long periods of time with bad luck, which you might not be comfortable with I was just using it as an example. PPS method has no luck factor, the pool might just be displaying the luck even though it doesn't have any effect on payouts. PPS usually has higher fees, so it's a personal preference, personally I avoid it since I'll make the same amount with the other payout methods just with more variance.
http://eligius.st/~gateway/ is my personal favorite, it's as close to pps as possible with zero fees. It does have long round times due to being a smaller pool at the moment, but during good luck your old shares from bad luck are paid. It also pays out in MINED coins, not the pool sending you BTC. So the coins show up in your wallet as mined, it's still just BTC just kind of cool. And being a smaller pool you're helping keep the blockchain decentralized which is good for bitcoin.
If you need/want more steady payouts daily obviously you will need to go on a bigger pool, if it's one of the bigger pools I would just choose the one with the lowest fee and not worry too much about luck. Slush pool is also a good pool, I have never mined f2pool or antpool.
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