Mining Pool Criteria
Pool Size
Mining pools allow many miners to share (pool) their effort to find blocks faster and share the rewards. Pools with larger hash rates will find more blocks, giving you more frequent rewards, but smaller relative to pools with fewer miners. Over time, it averages out as the discovery of blocks is entirely based on luck.
We encourage miners to spread their mining power so that no one pool has too much of the network hash rate.
Here is a convenient link to view the size of different pools. This is the block explorer maintained by the valued community member @psyrax. He maintains a very useful website called Psyraxpedia where he blogs about Horizen node development, Horizen mining, and all things Horizen.
Here is an example of a useful chart found at Psyraxpedia.
Pool Features
Does the pool allow anonymous mining? Or must you register as a user?
Does the pool offer service for other coins that you are interested?
What are the payout terms? Some pools will such as zen.Zhash.pro will autopay into your wallet every 0.1 ZEN. Some people will prefer that they have all their ZEN delivered to their wallet as soon as possible. Other pools such as Luckpool allow you to set a threshold balance before you are paid. In the middle is Luxor that pays every 1 ZEN.
Does the pool have servers located in your geographic area? Long hops across the internet might cause you to lose a block if another miner is able to broadcast its solution to the network before you do.
Pool Fees
Pool fees are retained by the pool operators to defray their expenses and compensate them for their efforts, They can range from 0 to 4% based on the pool.
Pool Support
Are the managers of the pool available for technical support? What is there preferred channel for technical support? Most miners will need timely support, so support via Discord, Telegram, Slack etc is important.
Reward Allocation Plan
Pool managers use various methods of determining how mining rewards are distributed to their participants. This is usually disclosed on each pool's website. They are usually mechanisms to rewards loyal miners at the expense of "pool hoppers" who try to exploit pools by timing allocation of their hashing power - i.e. hopping from pool to pool.
List of Pools
Please see our website for a list of Zen Mining Pools. Explore their websites to see which best fits your needs.
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