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
This is a great topic and post. I like Ocean, and have spent a lot of time talking with their team.
The reality is they are a new mining pool and have a lot to prove. Luke has experience running a pool in the past, which gives it a bit more credibility, as well as some of the people involved. I have known Bitcoin Mechanic for years and appreciate him.
Kaboomracks has some hashrate with Ocean right now.
The reality is that mining pools are not very transparent and Ocean is offering something very different than everyone else in the industry and I find that really interesting. There is a possibility as we go into the halving that some FPPS pools have financial issues based on their payout model. FPPS has been super popular in the bear market because of having variable rewards can be problematic for larger miners with bigger bills.
I think different pools will be more valuable to different miners depending on their offerings, and it's important for miners to evaluate their needs.
My favorite part about Ocean as well as no need to sign up. I wish that was more of a standard.
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I assumed FPPS was a net positive thing until today. Mechanic has made me question this.
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I'm neutral on it. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing but there's trade offs
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From the miner perspective it definitely makes sense. Just never thought there could be potential issues with it. Jury is still out
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Currently listening to Mechanic's interview on WBD, think my attitude towards Ocean has changed. I assumed they would simply fail because they weren't maximizing tx fees but now I'm not so sure.
My biggest takeaway is we need every pool using StratumV2 asap. Big fan of Ocean's choices of template for the individual miners. Will be really interesting to see how they do over the course of this year.
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26 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 29 Mar
I just started listening also.
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I kind of going through something similar. Just listened to that pod and it got me a thinking a lot.
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Definitely. Dont necessarily agree on everything but made a solid case for paying more attention to stuff like this.
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