What is the best level of fees for a pool ?
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New mining pool are blooming arround with different levels of fees.
Some are free of charge, others jump at 2 figures.
Do you think - for the perenity of the mining pools - that we have to contribute to pools and what is the best level of fees to apply ?
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A mining pool is a tool to enable miners with small to medium hasrate to mine and get a more constant flow of coins. Otherwise the time between payments can increase to several weeks or even months.
The pool fee is typically used by the operators to finance the running cost of the pool servers as there are power, hardware and operations, and of course a small win for the pool owner possible.
The pool fee is typically calculated to recover the cost to run the pool, and these costs vary depending on the location of the pool.
Also new pools tend to charge low fees to attract miners.This means you can’t define the best level of fee globally, but every pool operator must define, what he thinks he needs to operate the pool and each miner must decide which pool he want to use, and one or the parameters for that decision are the pool fees.
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As a miner I would say: ZERO
As a pool owner I would say: enough to cover the costs and to have some pizza every now and then
As a greedy bankster I would say: No fees! Actually we will pay you some money we don’t have and let you repay it with easy installments with a interest smaller then a flea bug! (That is, probably 125 to 150%).
Jokes aside, I tend to stick to those pools which are medium sied and don’t cross the 2% fees…
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I also prefer pools where the fee is zero. Depending on how much I like the pool I typically donate 1-2 percent.
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You normally see a correlation between developer effort and DDoS robustness and fees.
At 0% - You’ll get the standard github interface and should always have backup pools configured.
At 1% - You should have a nice interface with medium levels of redundancy.
At 2% - You’ll want a nice interface like xhash.net or verters.com and expect good robust protection against attacks and good server redundancy.
In a rare occurrence, you’ll get the service of a 2% pool and the charges of a 1% pool, in those cases I always donate 1%…
