As you probably know, a mining pool is a structure in which more workers send hashing power to mine a certain currency collectively to gain more efficiency and power. Due to high difficulty of today mining, the use of pool is necessary and solo mining has becoming totally profitless. Therefore it’s very important to find the right pool and configure and use it in a profitable way in order to avoid losses in your coins. Here we are going to see what to consider and how.

Most important algorithms

First of all you should consider the hashing algorithm you would like to mine into. Please see below a list of most important algorithm with each of crypto currency based on it. When you decide the algorithm you want to invest into, you should also decide the related currency:

Scrypt: Litecoin, DogeCoin, FedoraCoin
SHA256: Bitcoin, Bitshares, EmerCoin, Digibyte
ScryptNf: LeoCoin
X11: Dash, FuelCoin, StartCoin, VCash
X13: HellenicCoin, AmberCoin
Kekkak: Maxcoin
X15: HTMLcoin, MaryJane
Nist5: TalkCoin
NeoScript: Feathercoin, Orbitcoin, Phoenixcoin
Lyra2RE: Vertcoin, Crypto
WhirpoolX: Vanillacoin
Qubit : DGB-Qubit
Quark: Quark, Monetary Unit, AmsterdamCoin
Axiom: Axiom
Lyra2REv2 : Vertcoin
ScryptJaneNf16: LeoCoin
Blake256r8: BlakeCoin, Decred, Dirac
Blake256r14: Decred
Blake256r8vnl: Vanillacoin
Hodl: Hodlcoin
DaggerHashimoto: Ethereum, Ethereum Classic
Decred: Decred
CryptoNight: Monero, DigitalNote
Lbry: Lbry
Equihash: Zcash, Zcash Classic, Zencash, Hush
Pascal: PascalCoin
X11Gost: SIBCoin
Sia: Siacoin
Blake2s: NevaCoin, Netko Coin, Verge

At this point you should also decide if you want to mine with your own hardware or you want to rent hardware or hash power. In the first case the result of mining will be all yours (when electricity paid) but you would have an high investment to do initially. In the second case you have no initial investment, but there is the risk of low profit or in some case also to have no profit at all. Here we will not discuss on the best method to mine, but instead, the way to best send hashes to the pool.

Pools aspects

The quality and legit of pool is the most important thing to consider. Avoid unknown pools with very low workers, they could be always at risk to disappear. Also consider a low commission pool, with a clear interface and a settable payout threshold. In fact there are many pools that keep very high (and unmodifiable) payout threshold and therefore you will need more liquidity to work with them.

Another very important aspect is the amount of hashes to produce and the frequency which you are sending it to the pool. It’s better to send a lower amount of hashes but constantly in a long period of time. It’s worse, instead, to send a very high power for a short time. In fact the pool needs time to start receiving at maximum power, so you would lose precious hashrate in that second case. Also it’s important that you supply hash rate continuously and not in stop and go. This is also important because otherwise your shares will be broken into different blocks and this is inefficient.

All these small considerations gives you the possibility to be maximum efficient and not to lose any part of your precious mining work. Stay tuned