and always been honnest with their miners, so you shouldn't worry.
I agree with the second part, but I'm afraid I have to disagree with the first part, Antpool aka Bitmain's pool has been nothing but honest, they claim to have a 0% PPLNS payment system, and to this point in time, most users still believe they are mining there for free, what Bitmain keeps 'intentionally' hiding from them is the fact that while the pool doesn't charge them mining fees on the block reward itself, they keep 100% of the transaction fees, that it could be anything from 0.1% to 10%.
So do I think Antpool will steal op's funds, probably not, but do I think Antpool is honest? hell no, no one should keep more than 1 day's worth of mining rewards or the minimum payout with any pool out there, I rather end up with a ton of small outputs and pay more fees than have a pool store my earnings.
I agree with you completely, at 100%. When I said that Antpool is "honest", I didn't express myself clearly enough. I meant only the payouts, meaning that yes, indeed they will pay OP if he has reached the minimum necessary.
However, as you say, their policy regarding fees (especially now!) is not clean. Also, personally I would tend to avoid a pool that holds 20% of the total hashrate of the network.
Like Foundry, Binance Pool, Antpool are in my opinion enemies of BTC. They mine empty blocks, and contribute to a strong centralization of the hashrate.
I prefer to mine on small pools, like at Kano, ckpool, or mmpool (before it makes an exit scam, unless the hacker was real? We'll never know). I understand that some people don't want to mine solo, or don't want to wait 1 or 2 years for a block to be solved in PPLNS to receive their funds, but in this case, IMO, they should consider secondary size pools like EMCD for example.
