Comparison of mining pools

 
Mining pools comparison

Mining pools are groups of cooperating miners who agree to share block rewards in proportion to their contributed mining hashing power. While mining pools are desirable to the average miner as they smooth out rewards and make them more predictable, they unfortunately concentrate power to the mining pool’s owner.

Miners can, however, choose to redirect their hashing power to a different mining pool at anytime.

Contents

Reward types

Top of mining pools comparison

Proportional – When a block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how many shares each of them has found.

  • CPPSRB – Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay.
  • DGM – Double Geometric Method. A hybrid between PPLNS and Geometric reward types that enables to operator to absorb some of the variance risk. Operator receives portion of payout on short rounds and returns it on longer rounds to normalize payments.
  • ESMPPS – Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but equalizes payments fairly among all those who are owed.
  • POT – Pay On Target. A high variance PPS variant that pays on the difficulty of work returned to pool rather than the difficulty of work served by pool
  • PPLNS – Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.
  • PPLNSG – Pay Per Last N Groups (or shifts). Similar to PPLNS, but shares are grouped into “shifts” which are paid as a whole.
  • PPS – Pay Per Share. Each submitted share is worth certain amoutripnt of BC. Since finding a block requires <current difficulty> shares on average, a PPS method with 0% fee would be 12.5 BTC divided by <current difficulty>. It is risky for pool operators, hence the fee is highest.
  • Prop. – Proportional. When block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how much shares each of them has found.
  • RSMPPS – Recent Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but system aims to prioritize the most recent miners first.
  • Score – Score based system: a proportional reward, but weighed by time submitted. Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time t since start of current round. For each share score is updated by: score += exp(t/C). This makes later shares worth much more than earlier shares, thus the miner’s score quickly diminishes when they stop mining on the pool. Rewards are calculated proportionally to scores (and not to shares). (at slush’s pool C=300 seconds, and every hour scores are normalized)
  • SMPPS – Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like Pay Per Share, but never pays more than the pool earns.
  • FPPS – Full Pay Per Share. Similar to PPS，but not only divide regular block reward (12.5 BTC for now) but also some of the transaction fees. Calculate a standard transaction fee within a certain period and distribute it to miners according to their hash power contributions in the pool. It will increase the miners’ earnings by sharing some of the transaction fees.

 

Difficulty

There is no “normal” or “standard” or “base” difficulty for Litecoin pools. Difficulty is measured in the same way as Bitcoin difficulty, but since the hashing algorithm used by Litecoin is much more complex (and therefore slower), pools need to use a share difficulty lower than 1.

In the first months after the launch of Litecoin, most pools used a share difficulty of 2-16 or 2-15. They could have used even lower values, but there was no point in doing that. After GPU mining became widespread, most pools moved to higher difficulties, such as 2-12. The reason behind this was to decrease bandwidth usage, as a higher share difficulty results in fewer shares being submitted. While this change doesn’t affect mining rewards, there is a minor downside, and that’s that the precision of speed estimates gets drastically reduced.

For this reason, slower miners may prefer pools with a lower share difficulty, so that they can get more precise statistics on their workers. To overcome this problem, some pools implement adaptive solutions that serve work units with variable difficulty depending on the speed of each miner.

Pools are sorted by reward system, then by launch date (for Litecoin).

Mining pools comparison list

Public Pull Pools

The following is a list of pull/push pools. You are required to register an account on the pools and configure your miners on portal account pages before mining. Each pool may have different payment methods so select which ever is best for you. See above for payment methods.

P2Pool Public Nodes

The following is a list of P2Pool nodes that can be used by the public, all nodes require no registration and can be connected to by simply passing your LTC address as the username and anything as the password. The nodes are also interchangeable due to the nature of P2Pool and as such it is recommended to setup a more than one in your miner config as a fallback.

All P2Pool’s payment methods are based on PPNLS – Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.

SPV Mining / Old Bitcoin Core

The following pools are known or strongly suspected to be mining on top of blocks before fully validating them with Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 or later. Miners doing this have already lost over $50,000 USD during the 4 July 2015 fork and have created a situation where small numbers of confirmations are much less useful than they normally are.

The following pools are believed to be currently fully validating blocks with Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 or later (0.10.2 or later recommended due to DoS vulnerabilities):

External links

See Also on BitcoinWiki

References