I've just started mining and first I tried Litecoin and on the pool I was using, it was easy to understand as the Accepted and Rejected shown pretty much matched what cgminer showed.
Now I'm trying Stablecoin and it's a lot more confusing, as there isn't this correlation and cgminer might show A:10000 but the pool only shows Accepted: 10 (just an example, not saying this is what I'm seeing exactly).
I was first on coin-base.org, which is a Prop system but then I read that these are vulnerable to pool-hopping and so I might not be earning my fair share on there. It also only has about 13-25MH/s pool hashrate and I was seeing a lot of dropoffs, which might have just been people disconnecting for the night but might also indicate pool-hopping I think. I was using the difficulty 16 port as I'm only running 464 Kh/s at the moment. I also seemed to be getting cut off from there a lot and it was switching over to my failover but I don't know if that really matters with it being a Prop.
So I switched to pnwminer.com, which is a PPLNS system, which I understand helps to counter pool-hopping and so is more fair and has a much higher pool hashrate of around 150-270 MH/s but it's showing my difficulty as 184 so I'm thinking this might mean a lot of what cgminer is showing as Accepted is not getting accepted by the pool, so I'm wasting my time on there.
I've been using Miningpool.co as a failover although that doesn't seem to even say what system it uses, other than VARDIFF. Nor does stablecoin.miners.eu. These two each have a pool hashrate of around 160-270 MH/s.
Then I read this https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/load-balancing-pools-for-mellow-variance-215735 and this https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/mine-in-multiple-pools-to-reduce-variance-78031 about using --load-balance to reduce variance, so I tried it with coin-base.org, pnwminer.com and miningpool.co, without specifying any quotas which the readme suggests should split it equally but it seemed to allocate most of it to pnwminer.com, around 350 KH/s, with miningpool.co getting around 85 KH/s and coin-base.org the rest. I know those threads explain that I should set the quotas manually depending on the pool's hashrate but it seems difficult to do that when it varies a lot on all of them.
I figured that if I could set cgminer to split equally over 2-3 pools, then I could see how much I'd earnt on each pool after 24 hours to compare whether one is better than another. It's very hard to do this by running one pool for 24 hours, then another for 24 hours as difficulty varies which affects the earnings anyway.
So my questions are:
1) Am I better off using load-balance and several pools or should I just stick with one PPS pool, even if it has a low hashrate, like coin-base.org?
2) If it's better for me to use several pools, should I exclude any PPLNS pools from the selection?
3) If it's better for me to use several pools, what quotas should I use for each pool?
4) Why is my difficulty so high on pnwminer.com and will this negatively affect any returns I will make?
5) Does anyone know what system miningpool.co and stablecoin.miners.eu actually use?
6) How can I understand if I'm getting a proper amount of accepted shares on a pool when it differs so much from the accepted shown by cgminer?
7) If using a PPLNS pool, will it have much impact if I stop and restart the miner on occasion?
Would it be pointless using a PPLNS pool if a couple of times a week I have to stop the miner for 3-4 hours?I'd be grateful if anyone can help a newbie like me get to grips with these issues
EDIT: Just changed my post to make clear coin-base.org is a Prop, not PPS. I think Prop is still vulnerable to pool-hopping though, i.e. someone jumping on late in the round with powerful hardware and submitting a load of shares, thus getting a large chunk of the reward to the detriment of constant miners.
I've also found out that miningpool.co is a Prop system. Still not sure about stablecoin.miners.eu but as it doesn't specify, maybe that means it is a Prop too. So there doesn't seem to be much choice other than Prop pools, except for one PPLNS pool which has high fees (3.5%) and is probably not suitable for someone who can't guarantee the miner will run 24/7.
I'm just trying --balance instead of --load-balance and that seems to have a quirk. It should share out the hashrate equally between all three pools I've specified but stablecoin.miners.eu shows 101 Kh/s (was 218 Kh/s a few seconds ago), miningpool.co shows 240 Kh/s and coin-base.org shows No Active Workers, hashrate or difficulty, despite the fact that cgminer is showing a list of accepted for that pool (pool 2) and no mention of pool 0 or 1 at the moment. If I refresh the site, I can see that my Accepted is increasing on there (although as I mentioned before, a lot of Accepteds in cgminer don't seem to translate into accepted on the site), so I guess there's just some issue with the site not being able to detect the worker/hashrate when using --balance, although it does still accept shares (although I can't tell if it's accepting all it should or if some are getting ignored wrongly).
So this mode might be good to use but it's impossible to tell if all your hashrate is actually getting used by the pools combined, which I find a bit disconcerting.