Topic: as a beginner, what to consider in order to select a pool/software? (Read 281 times)

Also, I started collecting my coins llike that. Good advice for starters and you can go, once you know the way, forward to mine more.

The problem is that 99,99% of the cloudmining companies are really just ponzi scams disguised as a mining website. The 0.01% "real" cloudmining companies sell you 100% of their risk for a small cut of the profits. Sure, you can make a profit with them, but since you're carrying all the risk anyways, the profits are rather small in comparison.

Also, the eco-friendly aspect does not work... As a matter of fact, it would be more eco-friendly to put an ASIC inside your house at wintertime and mine by yourself (on a pool or solo), so you can recuperate the heat and use less fossil fuels to heat your house. Cloudmining isn't something magical that happens in an utopian dreamworld. The 0.01% real cloudmining companies actually bought real asic's that use real power and caused real pollution when they were produced. The difference is that they usually scaled up, so they have an advantage with the power price, cooling, racks, security,... However, they usually don't recuperate the heat, and they have some overhead that you wouldn't have if you ran 1 ASIC in your living room (very noisy tough), for example: you wouldn't need extra cooling, you wouldn't need special power failover mechanisms, you wouldn't need security guards. So, all these factors would make it more eco friendly to mine by yourself compared to cloud mining.

I am using nanopool to mine Ethereum and Pascal, I find it the most profitable that way. I recommend you start there.

What is wrong with cloud mining? I thought it is better - no need to spend money on equipment, eco friendly, so on...

I think better to use nicehash instead to know actually what will be the best for your rig and i think everything is automated you don't need to setup them just install and run them you can start mining just make sure you are using Nvidia and AMD gpu's only supported other GPU's are not supported..
If you are mining with most profitable you can mine zcash or ethereum this is mostly people are mining and use claymore to manually mine dual ethereum..

With miner software there's usually not many choices per alt to begin with. You'll have to research which miner is most commonly used for the alt that you're interested in. If there are multiple software miners available, try to find out which one gives you the best hashrate for your specific set up. Beware of malware. If you're not sure whether to trust an executable... don't trust it.

Regarding mining pools: Find one with a healthy hashrate and OK mining fees. You won't get happy with a large pool if the mining fees are too high. You won't get happy with a cheap pool if the hashrate is so small that they rarely find any blocks. Also keep an eye out for downtimes. The most perfect pool won't be of any use to you if you're unable to connect to it half of the time.

can you share your criterias when it comes to selecting a pool and/or miner software?

i'd like to mine altcoins with my humble system, and i see theres numerous pool alternatives around. however i can't see any criteria to decide which one to select.

same goes for software.

any suggestions will be appreciated:)