Discussion: pool growth

@happyserendipity: It's refreshing that you bring up that topic. Thank you for that!

There appear to be a number of factors for establishing a pool these days. Among them ...

Publicity

I'm doing my best to spread the word about the pool on sites like Bitcointalk, Reddit and several coin specific forums by supporting miners on topics not directly related to our pool. If miner's ask for a pool to mine on, I sometimes recommend joining our pool. This would be one of the ways for you to help the pool too. 

I'm currently working on a Mining App for Windows and probably macOS (no promises though) that will allow average Joe to start mining without any technical skills whatsoever. The app will support multiple crypto currencies and default to mine on our pools which should help with acquiring new miners faster.

Miner Trust

To quote a fellow pool operator (supportxmr.com): 

Out of 20 pool submissions for new pools on moneropools.com, 15 are dead by the time I first click the link they send.

Many of the remaining pools give up mere weeks later. Miners simply don't want to risk it.

It took me half a year to get supportxmr to gain some traction with miners. Until then I just dumped money in the project. Double payout bugs, constantly mining with nicehash on the pool to give people freedom, spending most of my free time and risking my relationship in the process...

The pools that do care and go the extra mile are going to take off.

Source:  https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneroMining/comments/75ntis/why_miners_continue_to_choose_large_pools/do8bds2/

We too had our share of problems involving ... 

• Payouts on the Monacoin Pool going to the wrong recipients which was caused by a bug in MiningCore. 
• Miner's complaining about payouts on the DASH pool that wasn't our fault at all because the culprit has been extremely wild swings in network difficulty
• Miner's complaining about not receiving payouts for a long time. Since all of our pools use the PPLNS payout scheme, we cannot pay miners until blocks are found. If the pool is young and therefore has a low hash rate it sometimes takes forever to find a block. The Monero Pool's current bad luck streak is the best example. Unfortunately most miners don't know much about how pools work and vent their frustration at the pool even though those things are out of the pools control. I can't blame them though. Under the hood mining and payouts are a complex topic and it's hard to find information on those topics written for non-developers.

Publicity - I noticed this, and this is how I hopped on. I do like your genuine honest and non-pushy approach.

Miner Trust - I also noticed the issues. Bugs happen, and I think you handled it well, offering to compensate to those that came out. Miner's complaining on Dash - well, yeah sorry miners, difficulty volatility is a b*, so yes, your way to go is to explain and educate. Maybe write a blog or reddit post on this from your POV, and post it in your answers to those that complain here? The public post can then again support the aforementioned publicity / awareness.

I honestly think lots of tech influence nowadays is through forums & reddit. Maybe a suggestion to you for not waiting for someone to drop a question on what pool to mine on, is to passively mention your pool in your reddit/forum posts, so if there is some mining related discussion, just chip in with a comment and passively and casually mention poolmining.org . I've mentioned your pool myself on some crypto discussions in Discord.

I would really like to see not just this pool make it, but monacoin as a whole.  I'm on the monacoin slack channel, so I mentioned this pool.  

So I see the hashpower of Ethereum pool jumped by about 0.5GH today, but I am confused by the graph, it says we've been oscilating at 1.6GH for over two days already, but I swear I saw a different graph with oscillation at 1 to 1.2GH earlier this morning.

I'll investigate tommorow. Pretty tired right now.

Just following up. Now the chart shows 600-700 MH for the past 2 days. Something is really off with the chart.

Something _was_ off with the chart. With all charts actually. It's now fixed and shows the correct numbers.

> This site explan how to get your site on google : https://neilpatel.com/blog/google-index/ . When I try to search poolmining its hard to find =/.

> If you guys create a group or/and a page on facebook, it`s a great way to reach people.

> I like a lot this site. It`s clean, UX are much better than others mining pool, so if someone come to this site, the might like and prefer us :).

Xima, thanks for your comments. What you are describing is simply SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I can assure you that the site is fully SEO optimized. Unfortunately I takes time for Google to update the rankings. And just a hint: people coming to us via Google do not search for poolmining, which would imply that they already know about us. Instead they search for something they need such as dash pool, monero mining pool etc. Try that and the results will be more favorable.

So during your outage last night I was thinking "backup" should your outage not be a short term one time issue. So I wondered where should I point my miner in the interim and after doing my research I came up with another reason why I like your pool: PPLNS, vardiff, EU based. There weren't many other pools that gave me all three, in fact I don't think I found one.

I have a new suggestion.

Sample executables

While some of us more tech savvy people haven no problem setting up our miners and our executables, others less tech savvy people might be lost even following your instructions. How about you share sample executable files (.bat, .exe) on the guidelines, where the only thing people have to change is their wallet address?

Actually I want to offer novice users something even better. A custom mining app with a nice little GUI frontend that only requires the user to select a coin type, enter a wallet address and start mining on our pools. The app won't mine itself but leave the heavy lifting to established miners like ccminer, claymore and genoil. The app will download the correct miner, configuring it and remote control/monitor it. I'm already working on the project.

If you want some testers to try it, maybe find bugs, I'm here :) 

That's a great idea. Also up for testing when needed.

Thanks I will get back to you when its ready for testing.

Have you considered making a Google Ad campaign?  If you send me the texts you want to use, I will be happy to create the campaign and pay for it for a while, as I already do have some campaigns with my company.

Send me an email if you are interested :)

The pool looks great, and I'm mining since I read about it in bitcointalk.  Keep up the good work!

tanolokko: Sorry for responding late. It's been hell of a week - and not in a positive sense (update on that coming up here later today). That's totally kind of you but don't you think using your companies money for this would get you in trouble?

I'm the owner of the company :)  It's no problem at all, I like your pool and would like to see it grow. 

Let me know if you are interested and send me an email, I will tell you what texts and fields we need to be fulfilled to setup a campaign.

Cheers!

Could someone use the contact form at http://moneropools.com/ and ask if our monero pool (https://poolmining.org/pool/xmr) could be added? I might be helpful to write a few lines what you like about our pool in general. The owner appears to ignore me for no reason.

tanolokko: Email sent :-)