need to register an account to mine?

Registration is not required. Just configure your miner according to our instructions and start mining. Your first submitted share will automatically register you with our pool.

reported hashrate zero or different from what my miner reports?

Pool and miner hashrates are re-calculated every ten minutes. Therefore it can take a maximum of ten minutes for your hashrate to update depending on the submission time of your first valid share. The hashrate we display at the pool is a rough approximation of your hashrate based on your submitted shares and can therefore differ significantly from the hashrate displayed locally. When in doubt always consider the value displayed by your miner as the correct one.

payments in Bitcoin [BTC]

All of our pools utilize the PPLNS payment system. PPLNS is short for "Pay Per Last N Shares". The image below illustrates the system. One round has an arbitrary number of shares which is solely based on sheer luck. Proportional reward systems only consider shares of one round when calculating rewards. PPLNS however, uses a quite constant number N of shares for calculating rewards. This number N changes only with the difficulty:

 

As you know the number of shares needed to solve a block within a round is different. Round one and three needed (difficulty * 2) shares to be solved. Round two and four are quite short rounds. There were less than (difficulty * 2) shares necessary to solve them. Round five however is a very long round which means the pool needed more than (difficulty * 2) shares to solve the block. From this follows that:

• Rounds one and three are like proportional rounds. All of your shares from the given round are considered for reward calculations
• For rounds two and four, shares from the previous rounds are considered for calculations as well (marked green). In other words: regardless of round boundaries we always consider the last (difficulty * 2) shares. Your portion of the amount of shares is used to calculate your reward.
• Round five however is very long. In this round your lowermost shares (within the marked red part) are silently dropped if they are not within the last (difficulty * 2) shares.

PPLNS favors constant and/or occasional loyal pool members

Assuming blocks have been found, payouts are processed and send every 10 minutes. This process is fully automated.

payment schedule

You won't see any balance in your account until a block has been found by the pool and after the block has reached a mature status. This may take a couple hours, depending on the coin. As soon as a block can be considered 'mature' by the pool, your shares will be used to calculate your contribution towards finding the block. The more you've contributed, the higher your cut of the block reward will be. Your cut of the block reward will then be credited to your pending balance. If your balance reaches or exceeds the pool's minimum payout amount, the pool will transfer your entire balance to your wallet and reset your pending balance to zero. The minimum payout for each pool is listed in its 'Pool Stats' area.

Trustworthiness, reliability, support and low latency are the things you should consider when choosing a pool.