So, you want to mine Burst but you are a little confused on what pool to mine? No worries, I am here to help. I, myself, am new to mining Burst and this is what I have learned about choosing your pool: Plot sizes matter!
But okay, if you have done even the most miniscule of research, you would have known that already. But why do they matter? Now there are many reasons for that, but the biggest one is a pool’s TargetDeadline.
All pools have them, and if your best DL for the current block being forged is above the pool’s TargetDeadline, your will not be included in the mining pool for the current block. Sorry, and better luck with the next block.
Now, this is not good. You want to be included in the mining pool for every single block, especially if you are a small time miner. With your small plot sizes, the chances of you finding the DL that will forge the block is miniscule. It is possible, but highly unlikely. It is much like playing the lottery. You can win it, but let’s be honest, you are probably not going to.
So your best bet is to make sure you are always included in the current pool of miners. Because see then, if someone else in your pool manages to get the DL that forges the block, you get to share in the spoils. Let’s use the lottery analogy again. With a pool, everyone is basically pooling their lottery tickets together to increase their chances of winning. People who are mining with smaller plot sizes get less lottery tickets and hence do not add much to the pool.
Thus pools that are made up with bigger miners set TargetDeadlines to weed out us smaller guys since we do not add much value to their pool of lottery tickets. But okay, let’s look at some practical examples.
I started mining about a week ago with a ‘measly’ 875GB. Now having mined for about a week, I can say that, with my 875GB, my best DLs seem to average between 3 – 6 Months. I know that now, but when I started out mining I knew nothing about DLs. Anyway, I went on the forums and found out that the most recommended mining pool for small-time miners is pool.burst-team.us. So off I went, set up my reward assignment, and started mining. Barely.
See, almost half the time, my miner kept telling me I was unable to find a DL. This was very annoying and it meant that I was not included in the current pool of miners half the time. This meant that I ended up losing out on quite a few Burst coins because I was not there whenever the pool managed to forge the block before anyone else.
Took me a while to figure out what I was doing wrong, but essentially I got left behind every time because my best DL was constantly above the pool’s TargetDeadline of 691200. That number is in seconds, so if we do the math, they will not accept any DLs over 8 Days. As I explained earlier, with my capacity, my best DLs tend to hover between 3-6 Months, WAY above their TargetDeadline of 8 Days. So I was, in fact, just wasting my time on pool.burst-team.us.
I changed to m.burst4all.com. This pool specialises in catering to people mining with less than 1TB and they have a TargetDeadline of 63072000. That is a TargetDeadline of 2 Years!!! I have never had a best DL of over 300 Days, hence I am always included in the current pool of miners. This means I am always there when the pool manages to forge the block first. Now fair enough, on a pool with such small miners it does not happen often, but it happens nevertheless and I am always there when it does.
So, in my opinion, always make sure you mine on a pool with a TargetDeadline that you know you can always beat.
But how do you find out what is a pool’s TargetDealine? Easy, just go here. This has the TargetDeadlines of most pools. If it does not have it for the pool you are looking to join, then no problem. You can also manually get it by adding ‘burst/pool?requestType=getMiningInfo’ to the end of a pool’s URL.
So if I want the TargetDeadline for pool.burst-team.us, I will put the URL in my browser as follows:
http://pool.burst-team.us:8124/burst/pool?requestType=getMiningInfo
You will then be taken to a white screen with a line of code at the top. Right at the end of that line, you will see the TargetDeadline for that pool. Just remember that the number is in seconds and to edit it in your miner’s config file.
Good luck mining and may you mine long and prosper.
