Just some of my notes on the 4 pools I've tested:
- - Dwarfpool about 13.5 ETH/day with 330 MH/s (very reliable, proxy available, failover available, etc. - quality)
- - ETHpool about 16 ETH/day with 330 MH/s (unconfirmed, requires another 24hour run, very reliable hash reporting, nice client "qtminer")
- - TalkEther - very unreliable Java client, not reporting hashrate properly (requires geth instance!, could be issue on my end, e.g. firewall issue, port issue, etc)
- - WeiPool - stable pool, rather small, good payouts (no proxy/client, easy setup)
ETHpool has the most reliable setup (qtminer), TalkEther has the most unreliable setup (some Java client) and the lowest payouts per hash, Dwarfpool has a nice proxy but during my tests the proxy performed worse than mining directly to the geth node.
1 Some of the problems I have with TalkEther's client could be due to my very restrictive NAT firewall Tested both with Ubuntu and Windows.
2 I'll inspect my firewall but all ports are forwarded so not sure what the problem is with proxies / Java clients underperforming
3 I'm going to compare the pools with running an actual geth node and I'll try TalkEther again, could have been a glitch or whatever
Comments
I've been back and forth. When I do use a pool, I use Ethpool.org. BUT... For me at least, their hashrate stats are all over the place with wild variation.
My actual hashrate is 420 MH/s, but their stats report my hashrate from 200 MH/s - 600 MH/s with an average of ~400 MH/s.
The average is what scares me, because that is the equivalent of losing about one R9 280X worth of hashrate.
In terms of the actual number of payouts per day from them -- they pretty closely match what the online mining calculators estimate. That leads me to believe their hashrate stats tend to under report.
But, I've made a commitment to go back to solo mining and stick with it, and it is working out fine so far.