Topic: Preferred pool for very small new miner (Read 3394 times)

Really curious how you tested this.  The math says BTC Guild will beat slush over any reasonable length of time.  1% fee difference does not make up for paying out orphans and paying out namecoins, neither of which are done by slush's pool.

One deceptive part on BTC Guild's earnings is you have to factor in that you continue to get paid for roughly 8 hours after you stop mining.  As a result, the 24 hour earnings statistic is not accurate until about 32 hours of mining has been done.

I've stuck to slush pool as my primary pool for a long time now.  While other pools offer better interfaces (like 50BTC and BTCGuild),  I have consistently managed better day-to-day average payouts on slush vs 50BTC/BTCGuild.  My backup pool is 50BTC, and BTCGuild is my 3rd.  I am still testing other pools as I find time, but even when slush has 80% luck, i still manage payouts equal to what I get on BTCGuild. 

The problems people have with slush are related to wanting to mine alt-coins, cause they need to wait until the end of the round to leave, or risk losing all earnings do to the scoring system.  In such situations, 50BTC would be my current choice if you want to pop out and mine alt-coins.

for small miners i recommend a pps pool then there is less variance you get a flat payout per share

the caveat is the pool fee is usually higher on a pps pool because the pool op takes more risk and the have to worry about the variance

No problem. Welcome to the pool

Thank you Dr Haribo for taking the time to explain the concept ,

I initially did the research to determine a pool ,but when it came time to physically put my asicminer to work I found I was unable to get it to function in what I felt may be a suitable pool .
I found a video instructing people how to easily setup my little miner in the Bitminter pool and to be honest the interface of the software is very cool it is like a gaming dashboard with some really nice information included .as soon as I downloaded the drivers and software client it basically did everything for me which was not the case with the other pool so I think I will build my little miners and send them down the Bitminter mine lol.

I appreciate you peeps helping me understand.

The point is that winning a lottery with X tickets has nothing to do with efficiency or skill, it's pure luck.

Some lotteries run for a long time with a big prize. The bitcoin lottery runs for a short time (average 10 minutes) with a much smaller prize. I don't think this hampers the analogy at all.

You pay for the lottery tickets with electricity. The maximum number of lottery tickets you can buy per round of the lottery is decided by the hardware you have. And the exact amount of electricity you must pay per ticket is too.

This is the thing that makes the Bitcoin lottery strange. You have to buy a machine to participate, and not everyone are paying the same price per lottery ticket.

Mining in a pool is like playing together as a group. It increases the chance of winning (by a lot), but you have to share the prize with the others.

Not sure lottery is a fair comparison since not many if any win twice even in pools of 1000's of factory workers .
But yet 13 pools averaging 637 lottery tickets  have in a one week  won our bitcoin lottery 1322 times.
This is far from a lottery this is the result of a complex mathematical algorithm controlled to results in a payout every 10 minutes ,a lottery can go for long periods of time and on most occasions resulting in one payment to one individual.
Considering these facts what has bitcoin mining got in common with a lottery apart from who in a short period of time will be allocated the winning ticket ?

I wish the lottery had a mechanism to regulate the payout to once every 10 minutes perhaps I would not be here lol.

Is variance not the randomness of blocks mined ?

If so it would not affect what I see as efficiency per block .

I see Slush found more blocks per ghs .

BTC is 5 times larger but is on par with 5 other pools for returns per gh.

If my data can be proven over a longer period of time 1ghash would be better ultilies in the 3 better performing  pools and may help miners to look at something other than hash power alone .

It is not in anyone's interest to have one pool become over dominant .
I hope a different viewpoint can help to attract miners to spread the power knowing that there gh's are at least even in returns with possible higher returns for joining the smaller pools .

No, the Q&A I linked to is about the assumption that "since i have a small hashpower I must join a certain type of pool." I posted that question on the Bitcoin stackexchange because new miners make that assumption all the time.

Forget the small vs big miner.


So over the last few lottery rounds, BTCGuild won once with 619 lottery tickets, and Slush's pool won once with only 580 lottery tickets. You can take that to mean that Slush is better than Eleuthria at playing the lottery. What I am telling you is that thinking so is wrrong, the real explanation is that lotteries are random.

What you're observing is variance.  It has nothing to do with pool efficiency, and it is not something that can predict the future.  Trying to pick a pool based on past luck is simply not understanding how mining works.

The reason BTC Guild is preferred by a lot of miners (outside of interface/stability) is that it's so large that even when luck is TERRIBLE, you're getting paid dozens of times per day.  It's many small payments happening constantly rather than large payments happening irregularly.  Right now we're having a very bad round.  It's been 2 hours since our last block.  For many pools, a 2 hour block is the normal rate.  On any other non-PPS pool, this is equivalent to a roughly 12 hour round (or longer), but the pool is so fast it gets finished much quicker.

I had not noticed it was one week ,thank you eleuthria ,maybe I can find a longer history .

Thank you Dr Haribo for the link but there are only couple posts discussing the merits of pools .

What I was referring to was that even though BTC Guild has the most Blocks discovered does not instantly mean it is the preferred choice for a small new  miner .

I suspect a lot of new miners think big is better and of course that could have been the case .

My findings suggest that,
Slush's pool over the 100 blocks found took 580 ghs of power per block .
While:
BTC    pool over the 465 blocks found took 619 ghs of power per block.


When your pool find a block my share of the block would acoount for a larger percentage of the reward .

It was surprising to find the largest pool equal to some of the smallest pools in hashing power required to reveal a block exactly 617 ghs that was not expected by me.

The top pool BTC has 5 times the power of Slush's yet produce 4.5 times the blocks .

So it seems based on the graphs provided 1gh works more efficiently in slush's pool than any of the competition so far .

Obviously history is not the best forecasting tool but it is all we have as far as I can tell .

It would be interesting to find out what all the 617ghs groups have in common since blocks are said to be a lottery the hash rate to find them seems to have some common ground .

1 week is not a long period of time.  Even 1 month isn't sufficient for most pools to even out on variance.

This is the information I was basing my research on :-

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/btc-mining-pools-list-104664

I assumed it was over a long period of time since one pool alone had 465 blocks .

My hash rate is only 400mghs yet lol .

Still cannot figure out how to get an asicminer working

That's not efficiency, but luck, and only measured over a short period of time. More importantly, the luck you had yesterday won't affect the luck you have tomorrow. Believing so is called gambler's fallacy. You can read about that on Wikipedia.

Bitcoin mining is like playing a lottery, where each hash is a ticket with a very very tiny chance of winning. You can still sometimes win with just 1 ticket (hash), but sometimes you need a crazy amount of them when you are unlucky.


There's no automatic "if you have hashrate X you should join pool Y". Most pools accept any miner and pay fairly.

More detailed info:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10731/mining-pool-hashrate-effect-on-a-miners-income

Hello ,
I got my Asicminer today and was figuring out which pool would be best for my miner .

I have been trying out mining with my graphics card gtx460 for a few days to see how it all works .
I watched a video and the guy showed me exactly how to set up my GPU to get on Slush's pool so thats what I did .
But now I got something 5 times faster and uses much less power I wanted to make sure I was using it efficiently and to set the foundation for future miners .

Lucky for me Slushes pool seems to be top of the list for efficiency.

There are some small pools that are as efficient but I trust slush's pool so no reason to try others .

Using the data on the pie chart we have :

POOL               Ghs  per block found   

Slush's pool       580
Eclipse             590
Giga's              593
50BTC             617
Asicminer solo   617
Discus fish        617
Ozcoin             617
175BTC.com     617
BTC                619
P2pool            645
GHash.10        674
Bitminter         715
Eligius            787

Although BTC Guild has the most Ghash powerand the most Blocks found Slush's pool finds more blocks per Ghs of power .
Since I'am only ever likely to have a couple Gh's of power I think Slushes will be the best for me.

I'am very new to bitcoin so any comments or advice would be very welcome .
Especially if I'am talking out my bottom.