Once I was able to get my first rig running I had to figure out what pool I would like to join. Boy what choice and the list of Pools was long. I tried one recommendation, but they were not accepting new miners as they had run out of bandwidth and were just trying to maintain their current miners until a unidentified future time when they would increase their bandwidth. I tried a couple others, large and small with mixed results. Obviously I was able to mine on any of them, but some were difficult to get around in, information was thin at best, and one had very annoying pop up ads.
There are definitely many well run pools out there, and certainly some that have some work to do, but what makes a pool good? Is it fees or lack thereof, efficiency, size, protection, or something else? Well, I was about to find out as it was time to hunt down a good spot to plant some rigs that I was comfortable with. I thought about multi-pools as reviewed in this link
http://www.cryptopros.com/2014/01/multipoolus-best-practices-for-auto.html , but I was interested in mining Litecoin, so I decided to focus on sites that were dedicated to my interest. I tried to be diligent in my search but with so many choices my methods became less sophisticated. By chance I came across
COINHUNTR.COM in a long list of Pools, the name just caught my eye, so I investigated.
I did a brief review of the site, seemed ok, fees were listed, they were not a huge pool, but big enough in my mind to do some block damage so what the heck lets give it a shot.
After getting through registration and hooking up a rig I perused the site. The information was similar to other sites, was easy to get around in, and they found a block within 10 minutes of joining, and another a hour later! Excellent, what else can you ask for!
Well, I was about to find out through experience.
Efficiency - yup, its there usually well over 99%, I think I saw it dip to 98% only a couple times since joining. This is achieved through Geo Stratum servers set up with SmartDiff and located throughout the USA, Europe and Asia. This achieves a very low latency and the enterprise level hardware with load sharing and back ups to the backups ensure your rigs are doing their thing 24/7. Higher efficiency = MoAr Blocks
Fees - Yup they have those to. 1% pool fee, a optional 1% donation to the site, and they only charge the network fee of .001% to transfer. I have seen some sites with higher and some lower, but I have not removed my 1% donation as I feel you get what you pay for and with the headaches I have had getting going, having to not worry about a pools uptime and future existence is a big plus for me.
What else, yes, the site is intuitive, well laid out, protected from DDOS attacks, easily accessible and usable from any device and big enough to churn out some serious blocks. This is definitely not average, but we hit the motherlode of blocks just yesterday. 13 blocks in just over 12 hours, alot of high-fiving going on the IRC channel over that period, which leads me to another important consideration. Service and community.
If you happen to go over to
CoinHuntr.com be sure to check out the IRC channel and catch up with LiteSaber and WarHawk24. They run a very tight ship, and most importantly are available. They handle issues, concerns, problems, questions, scammers, and trolls with equal exuberance.
The IRC channel is quite active and a helping hand can usually be found for those stubborn rig problems or optimizing to achieve higher outputs. I think what is most interesting is the diversity of rigs, people and of course the subjects that come up. There are a handful of CPU miners, and a large spread from a few GPUs to what I can only imagine to be hundreds of GPUs. Each unique, active, and supportive whether 5 Khs or 100,000 Mhs. Concerning the subjects that come up lets just say it covers everything you can imagine from rigs, politics, whiskey and of course how to convince your significant other to let you add another GPU or rig to your already overcrowded and overheated den.
I started with CoinHuntr when they were about 600 Mhs and since they have grown to just shy of 1.2 Ghs with no issues or detriment to service Their goal is to be the best LiteCoin Pool in the world, and I think they are pretty darn close to that goal. If you are looking for a rock solid LiteCoin mining pool that is dedicated to security, performance, and has a strong focus on community and helping others check it out, and give us a shout.
