Aside from choosing the best mining pool in terms of fees and coins offered, one more thing to worry about is the location of its servers.
People who play online games might be used to worry about such a thing, but new crypto miners might be unaware.
In this article, let’s check how the location of a mining pool matters and what Australian miners can do to improve their mining in this sense.
Does the location matter when mining?
The answer here is: it depends.
It is not the location itself that matters, but the latency. Usually, the longer the distance of the server, then the higher the latency.
That is not a rule, as other factors may be involved and impact your connection to a mining pool server.
It is always good to test the latency with different mining pools and find the one which has the lowest for your internet connection.
On online games, very distant servers give you high latency and then actions take longer to get finished.
In League of Legends, you might miss killing a minion at the right time. At CS: GO, you might easily miss a shot because of high latency. With mining, a different issue arises, which is stale shares.
If you are a new miner just looking to get into a mining pool for the first time, a share is what you need to submit and wait for it to get validated so you receive your rewards after helping to validate blocks.
However, if the latency is high and starts to mess with your connection to the pool, your shares get rejected because they are received too late by the pool and are no longer valid.
Stale shares are somewhat normal to happen, but the “normal” here should be 2 every 1000 shares sent. If you get too many stale shares, you start to lose profit and should move to a different mining pool.
Other factors can affect the speed with which your shares are sent. You should have a good mining rig that is up to the demands of the coin you are mining. That way you don’t take too long calculating a share.
Updated mining software is also necessary. This should be no surprise, but always make sure you updated your software.
Last but not least, make sure your internet provider is giving you enough speed – at least the speed you are paying for.
If all of the above is fine and you keep getting stale shares, then the issue might be the mining pool server location: it is too far from you.
In that case, look for servers that are closer.
How to find the best mining pool?
Many factors come into play when choosing the best mining pool to start profiting off blockchains.
In this article, we are focusing on latency, but here we can take a brief look at other reasons that should make you consider some mining pools over others.
Coins offered
This has been discussed in other articles here at CoinWut, but it is worth repeating. If you are in this game to make a profit, choose mining pools that support highly profitable coins.
We are talking about Ether, Monero, Dogecoin, Litecoin, etc. You can always check how much any coin values at CoinMarketCap.
Fluctuations are displayed there too, as well as all types of valuable information you need to decide.
Another helpful tool that helps you decide is WhatToMine. On this site, you can enter your hardware information and it will show you which coins can be mined by your system.
Reputation
There are scammers in all types of business. Crypto is a business too, a very profitable one, so you should always pick a mining pool that has a good reputation behind it.
Pools are owned by individuals or groups of individuals, and if they mess up, the community ends up knowing of it sooner or later.
If you are interested in a mining pool, you can learn about its reputation by reading comments on Reddit, posts on huge crypto sites, etc. If a given pool has too many negative comments about it, it is best to avoid joining it.
Size
One rule of thumb is that the larger a pool, the best. However, this is only true if your machine can keep up with everyone else in the pool.
If you have a humbler mining rig, then going for smaller pools can be a good business.
After all, mining pools are combined efforts to maximize profit when your solo power isn’t enough.
Then, try to find a balance between your solo computing power and that of a pool. It is by finding such balance that you can make a profit.
Latency
Again, choose a mining pool that has low latency for your location. Some pools have that information right on the main page.
With others, you will have to figure out through other methods, such as testing.
Which Coins Are Best To Mine?
This is a common question that new miners ask even before they start mining. There are different ways to answer, as we should consider what “best” means.
Usually, “best” is about profitability and/or ease of mining (this relates to the competitiveness of a network).
However, it can also be acceptability as a means of buying things, or how good is the technology so you should become a part of the network to support its development.
With the last criteria, there are so many options. After all, blockchain technology has been booming all around the world. Many professionals are working hard to implement new, exciting features.
The Ethereum network, for example, allows multiple tokens to be issued, creating different currencies and also decentralized apps (DAPPS).
If all you want is profit, then let’s take a look at some coins which are profitable and easy to mine:
Monero
Monero (XMR) has been popular for a long time now. It is easy to mine even without a GPU, but then you would not get too much profit out of the activity.
With a GPU, however, things change and you can start to make money out of mining.
Monero is characterized by making it even more difficult to track transactions. Unlike other digital currencies, Monero does not arise from the bitcoin code.
A new protocol called CryptoNote, created from scratch is used.
It takes the privacy of user data even more seriously and makes it difficult to track the values sent from one person to another.
Monero’s advocates consider the cryptocurrency to be the first that actually makes any kind of tracking impossible.
Ravencoin
Another very popular coin right now, Ravencoin has been gaining popularity and a huge market capitalization.
It is very easy to set it up and start mining. Just like Monero, it can also be mined with a CPU, but you get more profit by mining with a GPU.
Four features make Ravencoin outstand:
- ASIC Resistant – Uses the KAWPOW hashing algorithm to discourage ASIC hardware development.
- Fair launch – everyone had the same opportunity to mine or buy RVN from day one.
- No pre-mine, no ICO, and no coins for the developer or founder rewards.
- Community-oriented and true open source.
Zcash
Here we already start to repeat ourselves, but Zcash is one more coin that can be mined with either CPU or GPU, and you can already guess which method brings you more profit. Setting it up is easy, and plenty of mining pools give support to it.
Read Mining With CPU And GPU At The Same Time.
What allows makes Zcash shine is its increased user privacy by implementing zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) to validate transactions without revealing much information. This way, the user’s privacy is never compromised.
Best Mining Pools to mine from Australia
This is what you genuinely want to know, so let’s take a dive and learn about the best mining pools to mine from Australia. As already mentioned, the best pools have lower latency for miners.
The thing is that there are few mining pools based in Australia. However, it has been reported by Australian miners that mining at Asian-based pools works just fine when the few existent Australian servers are down.
This is because there are plenty of Asian servers and the distance isn’t too far as to make latency a problem.
Nanopool
When you search for info regarding mining in Australia, Nanopool always shows up. Nanopool counts with an Australian server, making it easy for all people of Oceania to mine cryptocurrencies.
Sure, Nanopool is a single mining pool and offers only a few coins to mine. However, having a local server makes latency an almost non-existent issue (if your internet connection is good, that is).
Nanopool lets you mine all the coins already mentioned, plus Ether, Ether Classic, Conflux, and Ergo.
Slush Pool
Slush Pool unfortunately doesn’t count with a solely Australian-dedicated server.
Even so, there is one server in Japan that should cover the Pacific Ocean without issues, so it becomes a great option for Australians when Nanopool is off for some reason or if they want to mine coins not available at Nanopool.
SparkPool
This pool also doesn’t count with an Australian server, but it counts with a Southeast Asia server, so it should perform just as well as the Slush Pool for Australian miners.
At SparkPool, it is possible to mine ETH, CKB, and BEAM.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know whether location matters when mining, you should pick carefully which mining pools you join, depending on your location.
As it can be seen, the location you live in can also impact the range of coins you are able to mine. After all, many times it simply isn’t profitable to mine alone.
So, pick a mining pool that has a decent latency for your city and start validating those blocks.
