Comparison of mining pools

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Reward types & explanation:

  • CPPSRB - Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay. [1]
  • 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. [2]
  • ESMPPS - Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but equalizes payments fairly among all those who are owed. [3]
  • 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 [4]
  • 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 25 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. [5]
  • 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. [6]

A statistically valid analysis of some pools and their payout methods: Bitcoin network and pool analysis

Name Location Size[1] Merged Mining[2] Reward Type Transaction fees PPS Fee Other Fee GBT Launched Variance Forum Website
AntPool China Large ? PPLNS & PPS kept by pool 2.5% 0% Yes No ? ? link link
BCMonster.com United States Small No PPLNS shared 0.5% Yes No 2016-01-13 Dynamic link link
BitcoinAffiliateNetwork United StatesEuropeChinaNetherlandsAustralia ? NMC, DOGE ? kept by pool ? ? Yes 2014-07-15 User/Dynamic link link
Slush's pool (mining.bitcoin.cz) Global Medium No Score shared 2% Yes No 2010-11-27 User[3] link link
BitMinter United StatesGermany Small NMC PPLNSG shared 1% Yes No 2011-06-26 User[3]/Dynamic link link
BTCC China Large ? ? ? ? ? Yes ? ? ? link
BTCDig United States Small No DGM kept by pool 0% Yes 2013-07-04 User[3]/Dynamic 20SPM link link
btcmp.com Germany Small No PPS kept by pool 4% Yes 2011-06-28 Diff 1 link
BW Mining China Medium ? PPLNS & PPS ? ? ? Yes ? ? ? link
CKPool United StatesSingaporeGermanyJapan Small No PPLNSG shared 0.9% Yes No 2014-09-20 User[3]/Dynamic 18SPM link link
Eclipse Mining Consortium Global Small No DGM & PPS kept by pool 5% 0% Yes Yes 2011-06-14 User[3]/Dynamic link link
Eligius United States Small NMC CPPSRB shared 0% Yes Yes 2011-04-27 Dynamic: 32 shares/m link link
F2Pool China Large ? PPS kept by pool 4% Yes No ? ? ? link
GHash.IO Netherlands Small NMC, IXC, Devcoin PPLNS shared 0% Yes No 2013-07-01 User[3] link link
Give Me COINS United StatesEurope Small NMC PPLNS shared 0% Yes Yes 2013-08-12 Dynamic link link
Merge Mining Pool United States Small NMC, IXC, Devcoin DGM shared 1.5% Yes No 2012-01-08 User[3] link link
Multipool United StatesEurope Small NMC Score shared 1.5% Yes No 2012-03-15 User link link
P2Pool Global (p2p) Small Solo[4] PPLNS shared 0% Yes No 2011-06-17 User[3] link
PolMine Poland Small NMC SMPPS shared 0% Yes Yes 2011-06-13 Dynamic/User link link

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):

References

  1. ↑ Note that pool hashrate is largely irrelevant but can be seen as a popularity measurement. It is a theoretical security issue if one pool gains above 50% of the total computational power of the network, thus consider joining a pool based on other metrics. The pool's total hash rate is very dynamic on most pools. Over time, as the network grows, so does most pool's hash rates. The displayed values are the pool's relative sizes based on the network: Small: less than 2%, Medium: 2%-10% Large: greater than 10% of the network.
  2. ↑ Merged mining allows miners to mine on multiple block chains at the same time with the same hashing.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 The difficulty of the shares can be changed by the user.
  4. ↑ Merged mining can be done on a "solo mining" basis (payouts in the merged chain are not pooled).
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Intention to continue SPV mining, Wang Chun, 4 July 2015

See also

Major
Active
Fledgling
Solo
Defunct


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