Once you get Ethereum mining hardware, your next step is to decide on which Ethereum mining pool you’ll join.
Note that mining has a lot of up-front costs, and if you just want Ether than it’s usually a better idea to just buy Ethereum.
A mining pool helps you get more frequent payouts rather than only getting paid when you solve an Ether block.
You’ll also need Ethereum mining software to point your hardware towards your selected pool. And, an Ethereum wallet to receive payouts to.
We’ve listed the top pools in order of hash rate share according to Etherchain:
Ethermine/Ethpool
Ethpool and Ethermine are two different sites although they appear to be basically the same pool.
They are currently the largest Ether mining pool with about 25% of the network’s hash rate and still growing.
f2pool
F2pool is also a Bitcoin mining pool. Its Ether mining pool appears to only be available in Chinese, so this is not a good option for most of our readers.
DwarfPool
DwarfPool is the third largest Ethereum mining pool with about 13% of the network’s hash rate. In addition to Ether you can mine a bunch of other currencies like Monero and Dash.
Ethfans
ethfans is another Chinese pool with about 8.6% of the network hash rate.