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 retuened 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 amount 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]

Visual examples of the various payout methods

Name Location TH/s[1] Merged Mining[2] Reward Type Transaction fees PPS Fee Other Fee GWK STM GBT Launched Variance Forum Website
50BTC Germany/USA/Russia  ? No kept by pool[3] kept by pool 100%[3] Yes Yes 2011-11-11 User[4] link link
ABCPool.co USA No PPS[5] kept by pool 5% Yes No No 2011-08-02 Diff 1 link link
alvarez.sfek.kz Kazakhstan 0.06 No PPLNS kept by pool 0% Yes 2012-04-19 Diff 1 link link
BitClockers USA/Europe NMC PPS kept by pool 8% Yes 2011-05-27 Diff 1 link link
BitcoinMining.Co USA No PPS kept by pool 2% Yes 2013-08-13 Diff 1 link link
BitcoinPool.com USA No Prop. kept by pool 0% Yes 2011-03-08 Diff 1 link link
Slush's pool (mining.bitcoin.cz) France 360 No Score shared 2% Yes 2010-11-27 User[4] link link
Bitparking USA 16 NMC, IXC, Devcoin DGM kept by pool 0% Yes Yes 2012-01-08 User[4] link link
BitMinter USA/Germany 370 NMC PPLNSG shared 1% Yes Yes Yes 2011-06-26 User[4]/Dynamic link link
BTCPoolman UK/Europe 0.5 No Prop. shared 2% Yes Yes No 2013-03-01 Diff 1 Twitter Register
BTC Guild USA/Canada/Europe 1550 NMC PPS/PPLNSG shared on PPLNSG 5% 3% Yes Yes No 2011-05-09 User[4]/Dynamic link link
BTC Oxygen Europe No PPS kept by pool 2% Yes Yes 2012-11-01 Diff 1 link link
BTCMine USA 0.1 No Score kept by pool 0% Yes 2011-03-11 Diff 1 link link
BTCDig USA 7 No DGM kept by pool 0% Yes 2013-07-04 User[4]/Dynamic 20SPM link link
BTCmow Europe No PPLNS kept by pool 2.5% Yes 2013-05-31 Diff 1 link link
btcmp.com Germany 1.4 No PPS kept by pool 4% Yes 2011-06-28 Diff 1 link
BTCWarp USA No Score kept by pool 0% Yes 2011-07-29 Diff 1 link link
CoinLab Protected Pool USA No PPS kept by pool 2-5% Yes 2012-08-09 Diff 1 link
Coinotron Poland No DGM kept by pool 0% Yes 2011-07-06 Diff 1 link link
DeepBit Germany 0.1 No PPS/Prop. kept by pool 10% 3% Yes 2011-02-26 Diff 1 link link
Eclipse Mining Consortium USA/Europe/Australia/Asia 170 No DGM/PPS kept by pool 5% 0% Yes Yes Yes 2011-06-14 User[4]/Dynamic link link
Eligius USA 700 NMC 105% PPS CPPSRB shared 0% Yes Yes Yes 2011-04-27 Dynamic: 32 shares/m link link
GHash.IO Netherlands 4350 NMC, IXC, Devcoin PPLNSG shared 0% No Yes No 2013-07-01 User[4] link link
Give Me COINS USA, Europe 12 NMC PPLNS shared 1% No Yes Yes 2013-08-12 Dynamic link link
Horrible Horrendous TT USA 25 No PPS[5] kept by pool 1% Yes 2012-08-29 User[4] link link
MaxBTC USA NMC DGM kept by pool 0% Yes 2012-03-15 Diff 1 link link
Multipool USA, Europe (P2Pool Node) 10 No Prop. shared 1.5% Yes Yes No 2012-03-15 User link link
Ozcoin USA/Europe/Australia 4 No DGM/PoT shared on DGM 1%/2% No Yes No 2011-06-07 User[4]/Dynamic link link
P2Pool Earth (P2P) 170 Solo[6] PPLNS shared 0% No[7] No[7] No 2011-06-17 User[4] link
PolMine Poland 20 NMC SMPPS shared 1% Yes Yes Yes 2011-06-13 Dynamic link link
pool.itzod.ru Russia 38 No RSMPPS shared 0% Yes Yes Yes 2011-08-01 User[4] RU EN link
Triplemining Europe 7.5 No PPLNS[8] kept by pool 0% Yes Yes Yes 2011-06-28 Diff 1 for getwork/GBT, dynamic for stratum link link
  1. Note that pool hashrate is largely irrelevant but can be seen as a popularity measurement. Note however that 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.
  2. Merged mining allows miners to mine on multiple block chains at the same time with the same hashing.
  3. 3.0 3.1 On about October 18 2013 the pool stopped payouts of mining earnings. 50BTC.com claims pool was hacked and all mining earnings were lost. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=359277.0
  4. 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 The difficulty of the shares can be changed by the user.
  5. 5.0 5.1 Pool also rewards stale shares
  6. Merged mining can be done on a "solo mining" basis (payouts in the merged chain are not pooled).
  7. 7.0 7.1 Miner-operated proxy available.
  8. Triplemining keeps 1% to redistribute using a weekly jackpot and affiliations

See also