What are some good mining pools? [closed]

Question

I'd like to try a bit of mining, but my GPU is way too weak to mine on my own. I've tried finding reviews on existing mining pools for ether but they're very sparse. Could you recommend a pool?

Answer 1

Since the question is about good mining pools, I want to highlight two pools which are unique in their appearance and tested by myself and considered to be good.

1. TalkEther is a partially decentralized mining pool. It is very interesting because it mines locally on your hardware and eliminates any latency to the pool. This works out because it locally sets the pool's account as coinbase. Once a block is mined locally it will immediately be broadcasted by your local client and eventually accepted by the network, without submitting it to the pool first.
2. EthPool is a predictable solo mining pool. This means if you would mine solo with a defined hashrate, you would find a block every x days, in theory. EthPool sums up your credits and pays out a full block to you, predictably, every x days.

Happy mining. Don't choose the biggest pool by hashrate. That puts network consensus in danger.

Answer 2

EthPool has a visual display of pools and miners by hash power.

1. DwarfPool is a multi-coin pool that mines ETH and other coins.
2. Coinotron is a multi-coin pool that mines ETH as well as other currencies.
3. NanoPool has been around for a while and is pretty stable.
4. EthPool is a "predictable solo mining pool", where the person who does the most work gets the whole reward.
5. Coinmine is another multipool that mines ETH.
6. Ethermine is another large multipool that mines ETH and other coins.

Remember, centralization of hash power is bad; try to pick a smaller pool, even if the payouts won't be as regular.