Bitcoin and Blockchain

Most profitable Bitcoin mining pool

Mining is a zero sum game so pool size has no effect other than to reduce variance not average payout. Your goal would be to acheive 100% of fair value per share.

Some factors:

• Inclusion of block fees. While small pools which keep block fees result in lower payout than solo mining.
• Merged mining. Currently adds a roughly 5% bonus relative to BTC only mining.
• Pool fees. Any fee paid to pool reduces revenue per share relative to solo mining.
• Pool efficiency. This one is tough because pool source code is often closed source. If pool has a bug which results in extra 1% stale shares then that in effect is a 1% hidden fee.
• Pool uptime. A pool with 0.5% downtime is in effect costing you a 0.5% fee. This can be partially mitigated by using miner which supports backup server.
• Pool latency. The slower communication is between you and pool server the greater percentage of shares which will be lost as stale in a block change. Part of this is due to server resource limitations but some of this also comes from geo-location. If your miners are located in China a pool which only has a server on East Coast US ISP is going to have a longer than average latency.

So the most efficient pool would be one that includes transactions fee, charges no pool fee, has low latency connection to your miners, offers merged mining, has high uptime, and has no hidden back end bugs which reduce efficiency of shares.