Monero Mining Pools

The top mining pools for each coin are similar in several characteristics. For example, the best ones, including those for Monero, have high hash rate distribution. This means they are stable and have low limits when it comes to payouts. The frequent earnings come with fees that are a bit higher, but this is a small price to pay for having steady earnings.

For your convenience, I have summarized the best Monero mining pools in comparison, showing the main characteristics you need to consider when making your choice:

These are not all of the features pools offer. More on that I have covered in the “how to choose the right mining pool” page.

I want to draw your attention to one of the vital aspects of choosing a mining pool – the reward systems. It’s good to get familiar with the different kinds of systems and their abbreviations. I have summarized them in the article on “Mining pools reward systems”.

To make sure, that you mine Monero without any interruptions, regardless of the circumstances, just register into several pools. Mining in just one can lead to setbacks. With having more on your list, you will jump into the next one in case of hackers’ attack, malfunction, lost connection, and just like that you will continue mining.

Mining Pools Without Registration

Registration itself helps XMR mining pools to follow performance statistics, in order to improve the network. The main registration components, like username and workers, can be entered indirectly on the official pool website. What do I mean by that?

Giving information on the web is not everyone’s cup of tea. The good news is, that there are XMR pools fulfilling that requirement as well. The procedure is pretty simple. Your hardware gear is playing the main role. There are some software adjustments for ASICs and GPUs. Let’s first start with the best Monero mining pools that don’t require registration:

Now about your privacy – I said no personal information will be needed on the pool’s official website. Monero for example is mined with GPUs. Those rigs are connected to your PC. Usually, you have downloaded their software (XMR Stak, XMRig) in order to work with the rigs. This is the key point for mining in a pool with no registration – the connection indirectly through your software. You can also copy/paste the information. When you do that, you are connecting your rig to the pool, using an access point only from your private PC. It is always better to double check if the chosen Monero mining pool is reporting your workers as active.

The profitability of joining a Monero mining pool can be roughly estimated. Few clicks on the user-friendly tool – the profit calculator, and there you have it. It’s fast and accurate. The needed parameters are the currency, hash rate, power consumption, pool fee, and electricity cost. The “calculate” button closes the process.

You can also calculate your cloud mining profits. Here you need just two things - hash rate and pool fee. It is very important to not forget that the results from the calculator will fluctuate and are 100% accurate only for the moment of estimation. There is nothing constant here.

For your convenience, I have added a time period feature. You can calculate your daily, weekly, monthly or yearly profit. It is possible to see how much the electricity would approximately cost you and the number of coins you will mine for each period.

Joining a pool or creating one are the conditions for a profitable Monero mining experience. Some people decide to go for the second option because the first one to take a piece of the reward is the actual pool. Then the remainder is split among the miners, in accordance with the reward system. All you need is a virtual private server (VPS). It requires:

You have one more option. If you think you don’t want to get involved with hardware and electricity bills, you can also rent a VPS. Nevertheless, you need to install the Monero mining pool software and configure it, but that’s pretty much all you have to do.

Monero’s CryptoNight algorithm (algo) pools are all over the world, because of the popularity of the algorithm and because it can be mined with almost everything that has a computer processor unit (pc, phone, etc.. ). With the recent ASIC invasion, the algorithm hard forked to CryptoNight v7. This way they protect the network from miners’ attacks. Pools have to change and implement the new v7 algorithm. With this latest version, almost every gadget can mine Monero.

The distribution of Monero’s mining pools is mainly as follows:

Pool Distribution (calculate by blocks)

Pool	Hashrate Share
Nanopool.org	24%
Minexmr	19.2%
Supportxmr	14%
Minergate	6%
Monerohash	1.3%

Monero’s core mechanism

Monero’s network is faster and more secure than ever. The team behind it is working day and night to add new features and upgrade the already existing ones. In this line of thought, it is appropriate to say a bit more about the improvements in the block structure and privacy.

For example, the 2017 Ring CT signatures, Fluffy blocks and Helium Hydra are worth mentioning. Let’s say a bit about each.

Ring signatures mean every transaction is signed by an anonymous member of the network. This way the network knows that the transaction is approved, and you can’t trace it back to its sender. Fluffy blocks relate to the speed of a network and the transactions in it. These innovative kinds of blocks are lighter and contain just the header and the transaction index. This makes even wallets sync in no time. The developmental team created the Helium Hydra software update before the hard fork in September. It was made to support the first two features.

In 2018 they invented the Bulletproofs, which reduce transaction size by 80%. They are willing to boost their privacy even more with the implementation of the decentralized network Kovri. Its future use will be based on I2P and its specifications. Monero offers a very useful feature called Multi signatures. It authorizes a transaction through multi-users.

In the past few years, Monero hard forked several times and had created four new projects: Monero Classic, Monero-Classic, Monero 0 and Monero Original. They don’t have very good implemented replay protection. What is more, these hiccups are not concerning users of the pre-forked network.

Monero was forked to the new CryptoNight7 POW algorithm, thus making the current and probably upcoming ASIC miners invalid. This has led to a significant decrease in the network’s hashing power and difficulty. CryptoNight is originally better on AMD hardware, so those with AMD GPU mining rigs might switch to CryptoNightV7 mining, so there are a couple of miners available to use.

There is another hard fork project, also affecting Monero mining pools. It is known as MoneroC . Nevertheless, Monero pools are keeping up with the latest network updates. I will keep you posted.