Over the last couple of months, cryptocurrency has been a hot topic all around the world. Miners all over the world have been extremely active. We have seen a big spike in hash rates, which means that miners are hard at work, which can be attributed to rising prices for most of the top cryptocurrencies. For instance, at the beginning of 2020, you could easily get ETH (Ether) for as low as $130, and now you’d have to part with more than $500 to buy one. Alpha to the cryptocurrencies, BTC (Bitcoin), on the other hand, has added more than $10,000 to its value.
For some time now, it has been evident that mining for digital assets by yourself is not the way to go. These cryptos are built on blockchain technology, which automatically increases the difficulty of finding blocks as mining continues over time. That means that using a pair of GPUs or ASICs is not remotely enough to generate a single block. What this means is that mathematically, it’s impossible as one rig will be searching for a block for months, which is fiscally problematic. To find out how much time your rig will take to find a block, you can simply do the math by dividing the total hash rate of either Ether or Bitcoin by your hash rate, which should be on your ASICs or GPU cards. The only logical answer, therefore, is to mine as pools.
The basics
In a nutshell, a mining pool can be defined as a server that puts together all machines’ computing power connected to it. This is done over the internet. The miners connect their hardware to the server to harmoniously perform mathematical solutions, which smartly divides the workload among participating machines to get the prized reward. When the block is found, it’s given to the pool, which subdivides it to the pool members depending on how much hash rate they provided.
Before you choose a pool, you need to find out a few things about them. These include:
- How many participants are in the pool: a big pool means it’s easier to discover a block, but then because of the number of participants, the payout is small. On the other hand, a small pool means more time to get a block but also means higher payouts.
- Ping time: this is basically the time it takes for the computer to communicate with the pool. An ideal ping should be at about ten milliseconds.
- The minimum payout size: it shouldn’t be a big value as it will take longer to achieve.
After your rig is ready, now you have to choose the right mining pool for you. Here are a few legitimate ones:
F2Pool
This pool was established back in 2013 and is one of the oldest pools in the industry. Its primary interests lay with Bitcoin miners. The pool users use the Pay per Share+ payout model. This means the miners are rewarded for each share accepted by the pool regardless of the blocks found. On this platform, you can expect a daily payout minus a 2.5% commission.
Poolin
This is another reliable pool launched back in 2017 owned by Blockin. Although quite popular with Bitcoin miners, it also offers a few others to mine from, such as Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Bitcoin SV (BSV), Ether, Litecoin (LTC), and many others. On Poolin, commissions are set differently for each cryptocurrency. Crypto such as Bitcoin attracts a 2.5% commission. Additionally, they use different payment models for each altcoin. This platform is favored because even miners using ASICs and GPUs can participate.
Ethermine
Ethermine is by far one of the largest and most beloved pools dedicated to mining Ethereum. Their servers are located in the United States, Europe, and Asia to help with lower ping times. To ensure standardized performance, this pool only mines with GPU processors. As such minimum payout is at about 0.5 ETH and the maximum at 10 ETH. Here, there are no commissions on withdrawals.
