Decred Mining Pools Review

First things first, you must take a few factors under consideration. They are mentioned in the table as well, but let’s quickly go over them – server location, pool fee, market share and of course the most important one – the rewards system. Pools with higher hash rate generate more mining power, which leads to quick block discovery. The result is stable and frequent income. Isn’t that what you’re searching for? Great, because I’ve prepared a list of the best 5 Decred mining pools in comparison on the market currently.

You should aim to choose the closest server to you, because that will reduce internet latency and the actual mining process will be more efficient. There are several other factors you need to consider when making your decision. By visiting the “How to choose the right mining pool” article, you’ll find every detail for the process. I recommend you familiarize yourself with the different rewarding systems, by visiting my dedicated piece on the subject.

Another aspect to consider when choosing pools is to have a few ones as back up. Let’s expand on that last sentence. It is clear for you and for us, that DCR mining pools (well, all crypto pools) are tightly connected to hardware, electricity, internet and software. All those factors can be a reason for the malfunction. Any hick up down the line will result in you not being able to mine 24/7. Our advice is to register in several Decred mining pools, which will be of use to the programs you use (software and wallets), to automatically jump to the next URL in line and continue mining. Be cautious and think ahead.

Mining Pools Without Registration

When you consider joining a Decred mining pool, you have two options – with or without registration. Creating an account is easy, you just need to enter a few bits of personal information. In return, you will be able to keep an eye on the progress and receive email notifications, informing you of your mining status on a daily basis. For Decred, there’s only one pool that allows mining without registering. Let us elaborate on the matter. This type of pools is called anonymous, as you don’t need to provide any identifiable information to join. This way, you won’t have your workers and wallet address associated with you or your email.

Now, back to business. Decred is mineable with GPU rigs. This type of hardware requires some fiddling. After you’ve downloaded and installed your software, run the program and look for a pool URL spot. That is where you need to copy/paste the following:

By making use of this dedicated mining calculator, you could estimate your future profits from joining a pool. All that is required is your hardware’s hash rate, power consumption, electricity costs and pool fee. Once you’ve entered the necessary information press “calculate”. Even if you are using cloud mining services, it would still be of use to you, but this time you will need only your hash rate and the pool fee.

The software will output a rough estimate of your daily, monthly or yearly profit alongside electricity costs you’d probably incur during the same amount of time.

Do keep in mind that results are only estimates, as the crypto market is in constant flux. You have many variables, difficulty levels and coin price among others. That is why I cannot guarantee any of the figures you see.

I am going to be frank – setting up your own Decred mining pool can be tricky. Contrary to that, it can prove to be quite profitable. I encourage you to consider this option because of several reasons: you earn by collecting fees from participants and because you’ll be assisting the overall decentralization of mining power. It is a great opportunity and responsibility altogether, but it will definitely pay off in time. You can learn first-hand how to go about creating your own pool by checking out the VIDEO below.

Here is a list of the minimum requirements, including a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with at least:

Apart from the technical requirements mentioned above, you will need some basic skill of Linux administration and how to use bash scripting. Bear in mind, that increasing the number of miners in your pool will in turn require more hardware power, but it will affect your income in positive direction.

There’s no particular pattern of distribution for Decred mining pools. They are spread worldwide starting with USA and UK, followed by Brazil, Germany and Russia in 5th place. Usually, pools are created in countries with lower electricity cost but not always. Decred is a good example of that. As you can see, most servers are situated in the USA, UK and Germany – all countries with expensive electricity yet great internet connection. It’s likely that internet speed is more important for miners’ performance. In any case, none of those two is crucial for the distribution.

Decred project goals

Decred was released at the beginning of 2016 as an open source, block-chain based cryptocurrency similar to Bitcoin. It was launch by the creators of btcsuite – an alternative full-node implementation of Bitcoin written in GO (goland) programming language. This toolbox was used in the development of various projects like: Ethereum, Factom, BitGo, OpenBazaar, and the Lightning Network. Several of Decred’s developers have also been contributors to the core of OpenBSD.

One of Decred’s main goals is to reduce the hard forks or better yet, eliminate them, especially those dividing the community. That’s why with DCR, there are voting protocols which allow the users to vote before activating proposed changes. In a matter of fact, Decred is the first cryptocurrency that was able to successfully combine PoW and PoS, achieving a fully user-driven hybrid hard fork. To participate in the vote, you need to mine your ticket or purchase it. It is very important to mention that both miners and stakers can take advantage of the voting system. This helps avoiding DCR mining pool attacks.

Decred uses the hashing algorithm Blake256 with 14 rounds. If you wish to mine coins based on it, your best bet is to use an ASIC miner.

Pool Distribution (calculated by blocks)

Pool	Hashrate Share
F2pool.com	43.8%
Beepool.org	23%
Coinmine.pl	19%
Uupool.cn	6.5%
Luxor.tech	4.2%
Other pools	3.5%