I have come to the conclusion that Ocean is the best for me. From the perspective of a small scale miner, who doesn't really understand bitcoin that well, but he gets it. If that makes any sense.
Firstly, I take my privacy very seriously. Boo. Anytime I do start mining with a different pool or just because I feel like, I make a new email for my machines to login to. I just learned that there are KYC mining pools. Whaaaat? Why would anyone ever???
I don't have to sign up for anything to mine with ocean. Just point the miner to an address and look up the address. Its fantastic. The site works great. I don't get booted out randomly. I get all the info I need and nothing extra. Beautiful.
What about rewards?
Many may like FPPS for now, but I don't like where this is headed. It is nice having predictable payouts. But, where do they come from? How are they being figured. What happens when fees are crazy? Who is having back room meetings deciding what hash rate should sell for while pumping blocks full of nonsense? It will come down to hash rate cost, not POW. I want to be a miner, not a hash provider. And I have a feeling the reward are going to work out just fine. I don't need to be checking that shit every 5 minutes anyway.
What block are we mining?
Although I have been mining for a few years now, I never really understood anything about what my machines were actually doing. I still don't really. But I have been learning enough to understand that it is important for me to know what type of blocks I am working on. I care about Bitcoin and what it gets used for. All that other shit is temporary pretending to be permanent. And that fact that we get 0% fees is pretty sweet. To me it is clear, they are on an important mission at ocean. I believe in the intentions of the people behind ocean. call it intuition.
Is there any better alternatives?
Do you all think Ocean is legit?
What are the issues with Ocean?
Thoughts on mining pools in general