Mining pools - why do miners need a pool? Pool in economics - its types and characteristic features

What is a mining pool and how does it work.

At the dawn of the development of mining, the complexity of cryptocurrency mining and the total hashrate of the network made it possible to mine coins even without specialized equipment. The computing power of the processor, and later the video card, was enough to sign a block and receive a reward for it. However, the development of mining equipment and rapid growth complexity led to the emergence of the concepts:

• Solo mining. Cryptocurrency mining alone only on your own equipment. In solo mining, the miner keeps the entire block reward for himself.
• Mining in a pool. A pool is a combination of the equipment power of many miners at once to increase the probability of finding a block. The reward for a block mined by the pool is distributed among all participants.

A mining pool is a server that divides the large task of calculating a block signature into small tasks and distributes them to connected devices. Contribution to general work Each miner participating in the pool is valued using a “share”.

“Share” is a small part of the work of finding a solution to the hash function for signing a block, which is issued by the pool to the miner. When collecting shares from miners, the pool server checks their validity. As soon as any “share” satisfies the current difficulty values, the pool server announces the signing of the block. After this, the pool receives the reward for the block and distributes it among the miners in proportion to the number of shares transferred, regardless of whether the block signer was among them.

Creating a mining pool is a full-fledged business. The owner of the pool makes money by charging a commission on the coins mined by the participants. As a rule, the pool commission varies from 0.3% to 1-2%. In addition to the “official” earnings in the form of a commission on income, mining pools are often noticed to underestimate the computing power expended by the miner. It’s easy to guess that a centralized pool has many opportunities to manipulate miners’ hashrate. In fact, this is an additional hidden commission for participating in the pool. Its size ranges from 0% (for honest pools) to 10% or more (for pools that deceive their participants).

Despite the relative simplicity of creating a pool, it is still a complex business. From a technical point of view, a pool is just a dedicated server with not the most complex software. To create a pool, you can use ready-made templates and step-by-step instructions. But the difficulty lies in attracting participants. Large pools were either one of the first and quickly became popular, or were built around large private farms, offering attractive conditions to participants.

For example, one of the world's largest Chinese bitcoin mining pools, Antpool, is closely associated with ASIC manufacturer Bitmain.

Why are mining pools created? Why is it harder to mine alone?

All cryptocurrencies that are issued through mining using the proof-of-work principle have a difficulty indicator. Mining difficulty depends on the number of devices involved in mining and reflects the likelihood of a miner finding a reward. The difficulty increases as new miners arrive, automatically adjusting so that a new block is added every few minutes. This means that competition is growing for the never changing size of the reward for a block attached to the blockchain. Increased competition leads to a decrease in the likelihood of receiving a reward when mining on your own.

For example, the average time to search for a signature when solo mining Bitcoin or Ethereum, even on the most powerful equipment, due to the incredible complexity, is close to several years! But this is an average estimated time, and in reality the process can take many years.

A mining pool, combining the efforts of thousands of cryptocurrency miners, significantly reduces the time to receive a reward. A miner, even with simple equipment, who spends a long time solving “balls” and not finding a single block, still receives a reward.

The greater the computing power of the pool participants’ equipment, the higher the “pool luck” indicator. Luck shows how likely the pool is to sign the next block. Large associations sign blocks (and, therefore, receive currency coins) more often, small pools less often.

Mining pools are created for cryptocurrencies:

• Bitcoin;
• Bitcoin Cash;
• Ethereum;
• Dash;
• Monero;
• Zcash;
• Litecoin;
• And other altcoins;

For beginner miners useful solution may become mining on multipools. One of these pools is the popular NiceHash. The peculiarity is that it automatically changes the mined cryptocurrency if profitability changes. Due to the algorithm for changing currencies, payouts sometimes exceed income from regular pools.

Advantages of NiceHash:

• No need to edit or configure bat files;
• Automatic sale of altcoins, which simplifies the receipt of fiat from mining unpopular currencies;
• The miner does not need to monitor changes in rate and difficulty to mine the most profitable coins;

Disadvantages of NiceHash:

• Relatively high commissions;
• All payments are in bitcoins (it will not be possible to receive promising altcoins to your wallet);

How mining pools are created. Which pool is better to choose?

The algorithm for creating a mining pool can be described as follows:

1. Software creation. Writing good pool script code requires a lot of time and money. Novice pool creators often, making minor adjustments, use ready-made templates with open source. But it is impossible to build a serious project on such scripts due to low security. As the popularity of the pool grows, the first difficulties will appear. Problems will most likely be associated either with hackers or with hidden algorithms built into the code that steal miners’ hashrate.
2. Creating a server. To set up a server for a mining pool, you will need serious financial investments. To create a stable pool, dedicated servers are rented or server equipment is specially purchased. Important Features servers must have high performance and fault tolerance. A separate expense item will be a wide and stable communication channel, as well as staff salaries. The mining pool staff will include, at a minimum, a system administrator and a technical support specialist.
3. Pool promotion. Marketing, advertising and promotion costs will eat up most of the budget. This is due to high competition among mining pools. It is very difficult for a beginner to compete on equal terms with the monsters that appeared at the dawn of the crypto fever and combine 5-10-15% of the network hashrate. Moreover, the centralization of mining in several large pools is typical for all currencies. The only way out may be to provide miners with unique services and focus on working with little-known and unpromoted cryptocurrencies.

The presence of competition between pools is disadvantageous for creators, but very beneficial for miners. In pursuit of attracting new users, pool owners create favorable opportunities. When choosing a pool, a miner focuses on:

Pool power.

The luck of the pool depends on how much computing power the pool pools. The more miners mine currency in a pool, the higher the probability of finding a block. If you are mining Bitcoin and choose a pool with a hashrate of only a few tens of terahashes, then receiving your first money will take a long time.

Studying reviews of mining pools on the Internet saves time and money. As a rule, it is easy to find negative reviews about dishonest and simply scammed services. You can get free, but truthful, reviews and recommendations from experienced miners on specialized crypto sites. The following forums are popular in RuNet:

• bitcointalk.org;
• forum.bits.media;

Pool commissions.

A very important criterion for evaluating a pool. The pool commission is that part of the income from mined coins that the server owner keeps for himself. High fees make cryptocurrency mining unprofitable. On average, the pool reward is 0.3-2%.

Frequency and minimum size of payments.

Many pools limit minimum payouts and frequency of withdrawals. This nuance is important if the miner has low-performance equipment. Accumulation of the minimum amount for payment may take a while.

Pool testing.

Most reliable way evaluating a pool means testing it yourself. Checking the pool allows you to understand how efficiently your mining equipment is working. To test the pool, connect the equipment to the service for 2-3 days and measure the results. Having performed such a simple operation with several pools, the miner selects the most profitable and interesting options.

Where can I find up-to-date information about pools?

Largest Bitcoin mining pools:

The largest Ethereum mining pools:

How to connect to Ethereum mining. Step-by-step instructions with pictures.

Let's consider a step-by-step algorithm for starting mining using the Ethereum cryptocurrency as an example. To mine ether you will need:

• Ethereum wallet;
• Video cards with memory from 4 GB;
• Mining pool;

In our example, we will consider mining on the Ethermine pool, which is consistently among the top five largest in Ethereum mining. In fact, the choice of pool does not play a big role, since the process of connecting to mining is very similar across different pools.

1. Installation of the miner.

Special programs – miners – have been developed for the extraction of cryptocurrency. In Ether mining, one of the following miner programs is most often used:

• Claymore (official program thread with current updates on the Bitcointalk forum https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1433925.0);
• Ethminer ( latest version can be downloaded on GitHub at https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases);

These miners work with all pools.

2. We are looking for information to connect to the pool.

To connect to a mining pool, you need to specify the pool server data in the miner program. This information is located on the pool website. For example, the creators of Ethermine located the data on home page in the "how to connect" section:

3. Set up the miner program.

The setup principle for the two programs is similar. Let's look at the setup using the Claymore miner as an example. After downloading the archive with the program to your computer, we find the start file with the extension .bat.

Open the file in Notepad and copy the connection data from the pool site into it.

When it comes to cryptocurrency mining, the words “miner” and “pool” cannot be translated literally as “miner” and “pool”. They have already received their content in Russian. " Miner" - the one who is engaged in mining bitcoins, and " pool"- a vital thing for cryptocurrency mining.

The process of selecting a block signature, otherwise called , has a large computational complexity. It is one of the most important parameters for a miner, since his income depends on changes in difficulty. Over the course of Bitcoin's existence, the long-term difficulty has continually increased, making it increasingly difficult for a miner to calculate a block signature alone.

Basic award systems

PROP (Proportional)- a proportional model, in which the block reward is divided strictly in proportion to the share of the share sent by each miner. As soon as a block is found, the counter of accepted shares is reset and counting starts from zero. This is the most simple system, but payouts are extremely unstable, especially for small pools. If a miner came and left during a “long” block, he will receive very little, but if he mined during a successful period, he may receive a reward several times greater than the average according to the calculator.

PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares)– also a proportional distribution, but smoother. One of the most difficult systems to understand, at the same time the most effective for both the pool and stable miners.

Payment is calculated for the number of shares sent not for the time elapsed between two found blocks, but for a fixed number of certain time intervals called “shifts”. Each pool chooses the number and duration of “shifts” at its own discretion.

Payments occur after the pool finds the next block. The magnitude of the reward depends much less on the time intervals between blocks. If a block is not found for a long time, then the payment gradually increases, if the pool is lucky and blocks pour in as if from a cornucopia, then the payment for each individual block decreases, but over time N*shift_duration the amount of payments remains more or less constant.

Let's look at a simple example. The pool uses the PPLNS system with 10 shifts, each lasting 1 hour. The hashrate of the user's devices is 1/100 of the total power of the pool.

The miner begins to receive the full reward, similar to the proportional system, only after he has worked at full speed of his devices for more than 10 hours. If at the time the pool received a block, he had been mining for only 1 hour, he would earn only 10% of his share with a proportional distribution, if 3 hours, then 30%.

It would seem clean water robbery. But if the user stops working on the pool, then in the next 10 hours he will still receive a reward - after 3 hours - 70% of the “normal” share, after 5 hours - 50%, and so on. Accrual will stop completely after the same 10 hours.

Let’s say that in 10 hours the pool found 3 blocks. In this case, the miner will receive 25 BTC*3/100, that is, 0.75 BTC. If one block is found in 10 hours, then the miner’s actual income will be only 0.25 BTC. But, unlike the PROP system, the balls “produced” by it are taken into account for another 10 hours, and if several more blocks are quickly mined, they will compensate for the unsuccessful period.

That is, the PPLNS system smoothes out the influence of the randomness factor, but cannot completely eliminate it. It is best suited for miners who constantly work on the same pool. Another advantage is low or zero commissions, since the pool does not bear risks to users, paying only what is actually mined. Some pools also include commissions received for conducting transactions in the distribution. PPLNS has several varieties that do not fundamentally change the scheme.

PPS (Pay Per Share)- a fixed payment for each ball accepted by the pool. In this case, the pool assigns a fixed reward for the ball. It is calculated based on the reward for the block, divided by the current difficulty in the network, and then multiplied by the number of shares sent by the user with difficulty 1. From the user’s point of view, such a system is the most “fair”, since all work performed is paid, regardless of its result – that is, it does not matter whether blocks are found or not.

But for the pool, this approach carries serious risks - since long periods between blocks, orphans (blocks not accepted by the network) lead to losses - the pool pays rewards to miners in advance from reserves, but does not receive income itself. Therefore, pools with a PPS system usually have a high commission - usually from 3 to 7%.

The PPS mode, in turn, has varieties:

SMPPS- each share is valued at face value, but at the expense of a delay before payment so that the pool can find blocks to replenish the reserve. The interval is usually 120 blocks (the standard number required to be able to spend bitcoins from an emission transaction). Typically, pools with this charging method do not charge a commission. Examples: Eligius (0%).

RSMPPS- when a block is found, the reward is distributed in proportion to the number of shares received from miners for the last block, without taking into account the debt for previous blocks.

If there is anything left after this distribution, the remainder is distributed in proportion to the debt for the penultimate block. If there is still something left after this, the debt for even earlier blocks is paid.
This payment system is beneficial for new pool participants, since the debt on old blocks is paid on a residual basis and does not affect the amount of payments to new participants. But the accumulated debt can become critical for the pool when the block reward is halved, as happened with tzod.ru. Currently, no major pool uses this mechanism.

In the long term, for a miner working on the same pool, it does not matter which payment system is used. Of course, systems without commissions are more profitable.

On the Bitcoin Wikipedia page Comparison of mining pools you can find the most complete comparison table of pools with their characteristics. But it is not updated very often and many of the data may be out of date. Many of the pools that started first have already closed.

P2Pool – decentralized pool

Often, pools were hacked by hackers because they knew that there was always a lot of money in their wallets. It happened that the pool administrators themselves showed dishonesty (for example, they disappeared with money and closed the server). To eliminate such possibilities, a decentralized pool P2Pool was invented, the program code of which is open for inspection and modification. Each node (node) of P2Pool is only one of the elements of the system. Participants should remain on one of the nodes to receive the maximum reward. It is not profitable to “jump” from one node to another.

P2pool has many advantages over the classic pool. First of all, it is anonymity - you do not need to enter your personal data, to get started you only need valid wallet addresses and email. The decentralized structure provides 100% protection against DDoS, and if one of the nodes “falls off”, the results will be automatically picked up by another node. A commission is distributed among P2Pool miners, which further increases their income. Owners of regular pools often keep the commissions for themselves.

Merged mining – mining of several cryptocurrencies

Merged mining is the joint production of several cryptocurrencies at once. Those hash solutions that were not useful in calculating the Bitcoin block signature are used for calculations for those configured for joint mining. Among the parallel mined forks are Namecoin, Devcoin, IxCoin, I0Coin. All of them are characterized by enormous complexity and low exchange rates.

Some Bitcoin pools involve cooperative mining of one or more forks, usually Namecoin. It gives miners 1-2% additional income. Therefore, when choosing a pool, pay attention to the possibility of using merged mining.

Co-mining is supported by Litecoin and Dogecoin. Since both cryptocurrencies use the same Scrypt algorithm, technical problems there are no problems with this.

Anyone who mines Litecoin receives an additional amount of Dogecoin and vice versa.

Multi-coin and multi-pool

There are pools not only for mining bitcoins, but also for other cryptocurrencies. Of the alternatives, the most popular is Litecoin (LTC). Moreover, there is also specialized hardware (ASIC) for the Scrypt algorithm.

In its classic form, a pool is a server for connecting devices that perform calculations using the same algorithm - for Bitcoin this is double SHA256. But over time, multi-coin pools also appeared. Miners who want to mine several cryptocurrencies connect to them, switching to mining the most profitable one. at the moment. The miner performs all switching manually. To switch to another altcoin, just change the TCP port in the settings of the mining program.

In fact, a multi-coin pool differs from ordinary ones only in that the user does not need to create several accounts for each separate fork. All mined coins are transferred by the pool to one account, from where they are manually or automatically paid to the miner’s wallets.

The next step in development was multipools. Their main advantage is that mining automatically switches to mining the currently most profitable cryptocurrency. This takes into account the difficulty, the price of the coin on exchanges and many other factors. On multipools, as a rule, you can mine altcoins using several common hashing algorithms: SHA256, Scrypt, Scrypt-N, X11-13-15, etc.

It must be said that many modern cryptocurrencies - for example, Ethereum and DASH - use graphics processing units (GPUs) for mining. There are also Bitcoin forks that can only be mined on central processors.

But, regardless of the equipment used, the principle remains the same: solo mining is being replaced by mining in pools, which significantly reduces the potential for decentralization, since the pool actually manages the power of connected miners at its own discretion. Including, for example, the pool operator can include in his blocks only the transactions he needs. The strategic goal of decentralized currency enthusiasts should be to improve distributed mining technology so that anyone can use it - as easy as connecting to one of the regular pools.

A cryptocurrency mining pool is a server that distributes the calculation task among all its participants. As soon as one of them hits the target, a block is formed and the participants receive their reward.

The pool has a higher chance of finding a block of transactions and receiving a reward than a single miner. However, if you participate in a pool, then you will have to share the profit with all participants in the “pool”, but for the majority this is usually still the most profitable option.

Ethereumpool- has been operating for more than 2 years, has a capacity of about 2%, a commission of 2%, a fixed commission for withdrawal.

If you are new to mining, you can try mining on your computer with your own software. You can mine with a video card or on a processor. This will be enough to mine currencies such as Dogecoin (created on the basis of Litecoin) and Monero. You can start mining the popular altcoin Dash; an NVIDIA video card is suitable for this. However, such methods are suitable only for initial experiments; the profit will be small.

They planned to create a cryptocluster on the territory of the republic. The first step will be a pool that will combine the resources of miners from the EAEU and allow them to save on commissions to foreign intermediaries

Photo: Andrey Gordeev / Vedomosti / TASS

The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, and the president of the Russian Association of Crypto Industry and Blockchain (RACIB), Yuri Pripachkin, agreed to create a Eurasian mining pool in Chechnya, a representative of the association told RBC. This is true, the press secretary of the head of Chechnya, Alvi Karimov, confirmed plans to create such a pool.

The mining pool will be the first step in the implementation of the “Crypto Chechnya” program, which is aimed at developing the region’s economy using blockchain technologies. The concept of this project was reviewed by the economic bloc of the government of the republic at the end of August.

What you need to know about blockchain

Blockchain— distributed registry technology. The term comes from English word blockchain - a chain of blocks. Blockchain allows you to create a decentralized system of relationships, where each subsequent transaction depends on the previous one. Therefore, transaction data cannot be changed or deleted.

Cryptocurrency, which is obtained using blockchain technology, the user can either purchase or receive in the process mining, that is, providing their computing resources to perform the mathematical task of verifying and carrying out a cryptocurrency transaction. For mining you need to purchase special equipment. In addition, the costs of organizing the process include expenses for depreciation, energy, rent and other operating expenses. According to the Russian Mining Center, the cost of the most popular equipment produced by the Chinese Bitmain is $2.5 thousand, and its payback period is about 12 months.

The principle of operation of a mining pool is that miners pool their computing power to mine cryptocurrency, thus reducing their costs, and then divide the resulting digital currency. The project should combine the resources of miners from the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU): Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Registration of the pool in the legal space of the EAEU would make it possible to refuse payments to foreign intermediaries, the size of which is now 3-5% of the produced coins - tokens, Pripachkin explained to RBC. According to RACIB, the potential effect of launching a platform endowed with appropriate powers on the territory of Chechnya could increase the republic’s tax revenues by more than 10% per year. According to the law “On the republican budget for 2018 and for the planning period of 2019 and 2020,” the projected volume of tax and non-tax revenues of Chechnya in 2018 should exceed 11 billion rubles.

The pool will be registered within the regulatory platform (the so-called regulatory sandbox) of the Bank of Russia - in the coming days, RACIB and the Chechen Republic will submit an application to the Central Bank to register the pool.

According to Pripachkin, the creation of a pool is the first step in a full-fledged cryptocluster in Chechnya. Its launch will become possible only after the adoption of laws regulating the activities of cryptocurrencies in Russia. It is expected that the corresponding bill will be considered by the State Duma during the autumn session.

RACIB also proposes to provide jurisdiction to crypto exchanges from China and South Korea who decided to open a branch in Russia. In addition, the association proposes to open production sites in Chechnya for the assembly and production of mining equipment and provide platforms for organizing startup platforms and conducting ICOs (Initial Coin Offering, initial placement of tokens - attracting investments through the sale of new cryptocurrencies). “Another step is the provision of electronic citizenship (e-residency) for project investors,” noted Pripachkin. These measures, he said, will be implemented over the next five years.

Creating a pool and further development The cluster will help Russia significantly increase its share in global cryptocurrency production, RACIB expects. According to her data, today in Russia there are more than 350 thousand private miners and up to several thousand mining farms. “It is believed that Russia accounts for 2 to 5% of the world's e-currency mining capacity. China is in the lead with 60%, the United States and Canada together have second place with 16%, then Georgia comes with 6%, European countries account for about 5%,” said a representative of RACIB.

According to Internet Ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev, technically creating a pool is not difficult, since pools are only web services that miners use to receive coins (tokens) evenly and predictably. Pools distribute mined tokens among participants according to rules approved by the pool owner. Therefore, according to Marinichev, it is important that everyone agrees with these rules - we need to find those who will be interested in participating in it.

“The creation of such a pool must be supported by capacity. And in order for the required number of participants with power to accumulate, they must have the same economic, political and ethical views. There already exists, for example, the Bitcoin-Russia pool, which unites Eurasian miners, so it is not clear who will participate in such a new pool,” Marinichev noted. In his opinion, mining pools in Russia have great potential due to the cold climate in many regions and inexpensive electricity.

They do not quite correctly assess the situation. Everything seems very simple, you bought the equipment, launched the miner program and just wait for the first coins to fall into your wallet. But the truth is that now you can only mine the youngest cryptocurrencies, which are cheap and have little popularity. Even if you manage to get a lot of such currency, you will either have to wait until it rises in price, or sell it at a low price, but in this case it is not a fact that there will be many people willing to buy it from you.

If you want to mine a cryptocurrency that is in the top ten in terms of capitalization, which means it is popular and expensive, then you should know that the complexity of the blockchain of most of them is so high that you alone may not open even one in a month block, which means you will not receive a reward. In such cases, people join together in so-called mining pools and work together to open one block.

Today we will tell you about what a mining pool is, how a mining pool works and what types of similar services exist today in this article.

What is a pool and what is it for?

Mining pool can be translated from English as “mining pool”, but today this phrase is already filled with its own meaning, which is why it is translated literally as “mining pool”. We call miners people who mine cryptocurrencies on home farms. And a pool, accordingly, is an association of miners with the goal of facilitating the task of mining this very cryptocurrency.

To understand how a mining pool works, you just need to do the following: just imagine a certain server to which all participating miners are connected. Each of the participants transfers their computing power to the server, and the server, in turn, combines them together and works to find one block of transactions. If the hashing was successful and the block of transactions was closed, the server, that is, the pool, receives a reward, and then divides this reward among all participants to the extent that they contributed to solving this problem. Reward distribution models may differ in different pools, but we will talk about this a little below.

We have talked about what a pool is in mining, now we should spend a couple of minutes on what they are like. Most pools cooperate to mine one specific cryptocurrency. With this, everything is very clear, if you know exactly which currency is most profitable for you to mine on your current equipment, then simply join the pool you need and you’re done. But there are also pools that specialize in mining several crypto coins at once, depending on which one is most profitable to mine at a given time. As well as decentralized pools and pools, which are services, that is, they provide the power of their clients to other users, after which they pay clients a reward in the form of Bitcoins.

Decentralized pool

A decentralized pool is a pool whose program code is completely open to change and inspection. Moreover, each node, or in other words, node, serves only one of many elements of the system. As a result of such a system, it is most profitable for users to remain on one of the nodes, since jumping from one node to another or pool hopping does not bring positive results. In addition, such pools are also very well protected from hackers and other intruders.

A prominent representative of this type of pool is P2pool, which has many advantages over traditional pools. He offers highest level privacy, so you don't have to enter your personal information other than your email address and wallet number. This pool is very well protected from DDoS attacks, and the commission charged for services is equally distributed among the participants, which has a positive effect on the final earnings of the miner.

Multipool

A very interesting and convenient type of pools are multi-coin pools, or multipools. Multipools are built in such a way that they produce not just one specific cryptocurrency, but several popular coins at once. Multipools are logical development multi-currency pools, where the user manually switched between mined coins. By joining such a pool, you download to your computer a whole package of programs, which immediately includes all the currency miners that it deals with. this association. Once a certain cryptocurrency becomes more profitable to mine than the current one, the pool will automatically switch to its mining in order to maintain maximum profitability.

Criteria for selecting a mining pool

Today there are already a lot of different pools and it is very easy to get lost in such diversity. First, you should decide whether you want to mine Bitcoin or other types of cryptocurrencies. To mine Bitcoin, you need special equipment, abbreviated ASIC; using any other equipment, Bitcoin mining is almost unprofitable. For other currencies, a farm of video cards or, in rare cases, the processor of your personal computer is quite suitable for you.

Then you will need to decide whether you want to focus on one popular cryptocurrency, which is most profitable for you to mine on your equipment, or trust a multipool, where they alternately mine a currency that is profitable for the majority of participants. Each option has its own advantage, so a multipool is very suitable for beginners, and for those who know exactly what they want, it is better to join a specialized pool.

Each pool has a certain set of qualities. Some of them will be especially important, and some can be neglected. We would recommend starting your review of mining pools with the following characteristics:

NiceHash - a solution for beginners

NiceHash is a mining pool that is very suitable for beginners or those people who do not have the time or desire to monitor the situation on the cryptocurrency market. At its core, NiceHash is a multipool with automatic switching to the most profitable cryptocurrency for mining.

The NiceHash pool is currently suspended due to security issues. The developers are working on fixing these problems and promise to restore the pool's operation soon.

NiceHash supports all the most popular encryption algorithms and has its own software for mining. You simply install it on your computer, and the system itself switches between the miners that are needed at a given time. This is undoubtedly very convenient, especially for those who are still completely “green” in this matter. The program takes into account many parameters, including: the difficulty of finding a blockchain block of a currency and its exchange rate on the market. If you want to mine only certain cryptocurrencies, then you have the opportunity to manually remove algorithms that are unnecessary for you.

In addition, NiceHash is an intermediary service for other pools, meaning clients can buy mining power from them, and the service distributes these funds among participants and pays out rewards. As for the payment itself, it occurs in Bitcoins to your personal wallet or exchange. The more computing power you have, the faster the required amount for payment accumulates; with a certain amount of it, you will be able to withdraw your share daily.

Other popular mining pools

We will present other popular pools for cryptocurrency mining in the form of a list and tell you a little about their features:

Ethereum pools

Ethereum is the second most popular cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, so it is not surprising that it has specialized mining pools. Today there are three main ones that are worth paying close attention to:

How to connect to the pool?

Today, mining in a pool, without exaggeration, is much more profitable in mining popular cryptocurrencies than mining in solo. And connecting to the pool today is not much of a problem. There are a number of closed communities, but most pools will be happy to accept you into their ranks.

To connect to a pool you usually only need to take a few simple steps:

If you encounter difficulties when connecting to a particular pool, then you can always find a lot of explanations and even step by step instructions. Remember, the services themselves are interested in you joining them, so they will certainly help you. The main thing is to choose wisely, and good luck with your mining.