The location of servers can make a difference when you are mining cryptocurrencies.
Depending on where you live and the pool you connect to, mining can become a frustrating task.
Because of that, it pays off to know what matters when choosing a mining pool. In this article, we will talk about that and suggest you good mining pools for New Zealand.
Does the location make a difference?
It truly depends on some factors. Depending on where you live and where the servers of the mining pool you are connected to are located, latency can go up or down.
The longer data has to go to reach you, the longer the latency, thus delaying the deliverance of important data.
Other things can impact your latency too, such as network overload or your internet service provider having trouble or purposefully slowing down some routes (this happens in some countries).
Because of that, testing different mining pools is optimal. You need to ping them and go with the lowest possible latency.
Read Mining Pools For Mac Users.
If you are new to this type of thing and don’t quite grasp what type of difference latency makes, just think about online games.
Online games require low latency so that all your actions can be received by the server at the right time.
In League of Legends, for example, high latency will make you lose a team fight because it is like you are pressing all the buttons at the wrong time. At shooters, it is like you are shooting later than you should.
As for mining in mining pools, latency can cause stale shares. If you are getting started in mining, a share is what you should submit after you helped validate a new block in the network.
That way you can receive rewards. When your latency is too high, you might fail to send the shares at the right time, and then you get stale shares.
Miners with a rather good connection stumble upon stale shares too, but that would be only 2 every 1000 shares sent.
Getting too many stale shares means losing money, and if you are getting them, the best is to find a pool with better latency for your location.
Stale shares can happen to factors unrelated to the internet connection. Your hardware needs to good be enough to calculate shares with the necessary speed so that you send the request before the pool moves to the next block.
This should be obvious, but always make sure you are using an updated version of your mining software. Plenty of software out there doesn’t even work without updating, but always check that.
Lastly, check if your internet provider is delivering what you pay for. Some companies promise to deliver a certain speed but never truly do.
If you are serious about mining, you need to get a reliable and steady internet connection.
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?
Different elements ought to be considered when deciding a mining pool to join and start validating blocks.
Even though we are focusing on latency in this article, other aspects can be taken into consideration as well.
Coins offered
The coins offered in a mining pool should help you decide. To be fair, you should first decide which coin you want to mine and then start looking for pools.
In the next section, we will explore great coins that you can mine as of 2021.
Even so, choosing pools with a large offer of profitable networks is a great choice. That way, you can mine more than one coin when the prices fluctuate and you want to mine a different currency.
CoinMarketCap can help you understand which are the most profitable coins right now, and WhatToMine helps you learn what your hardware is capable of achieving in the mining business.
Reputation
Scamming is common throughout the internet, and that doesn’t exclude the crypto world.
Although there are plenty of trustful sites to gather info, when it comes to making proper money, things might change. Always check about the history of a mining pool to know if the devs behind have some ugly story in the past.
You can easily learn about a pool’s reputation and its devs looking for posts on Reddit, as well as other forums and sometimes posts on huge sites.
Size
Larger pools are best for those looking to make a real profit. After all, the higher the combined hash rate, the faster the pool will validate new blocks. (remember: mining is sort of competition)
However, it is no good getting into a big pool if your hardware can’t keep up. You need to find a balance between your true hardware power and that of the pool you are getting in.
Latency
Even with all considerations above, latency will be the utmost determining factor in which pool you should choose.
If a pool has a ping too high for your location, you should just give it up, as you will get too many stale shares.
Which coins are good to mine?
There are plenty of highly profitable coins you can mine easily, be it with a GPU or a CPU. To check the market capitalization, current prices, etc., you can check CoinMarketCap.
Now, if you are looking for some expert advice on coins that are both profitable and easy to start mining, there you go.
Monero
We recommend Monero in a lot of posts, and you can also see it being recommended across the internet on Reddit posts or other huge sites.
Read Mine XMR With GPU
The truth is that Monero is very easy for beginners to mine, but also valuable for more experienced miners.
Its approach to security makes it highly attractive, and so many people join the network to get access to Monero coins and trade them when they are at a high value.
Monero is also an option for miners that want to mine with their CPUs. Sure, you should calculate how much power your CPU has, making sure it has the minimum hash rate to make any profit (even if a few cents daily).
Ravencoin
Ravencoin has been gaining immense popularity also because of its approach to privacy and security (to be honest, all crypto devs are always trying to push forward the best way to protect users’ data, and the ones that make it in an attractive way are more successful in attracting miners and investors).
Ravencoin’s tokens also can have many functionalities, allowing for a network of creative users that want to expand the coin’s horizons.
Another factor contributing to this coin’s explosion in the market is how easy it is to mine it. Mining it can be done either with a CPU, GPU, or both and it doesn’t consume much electricity.
Vertcoin
Vertcoin cannot be mined with CPU, but that doesn’t mean much as mining with GPU is always the optimal choice.
Vertcoin was created after Litecoin succumbed to ASIC mining, and it remains ASIC-resistant to this day.
Due to its protocol, Vertcoin is one coin that you can easily mine on yourself without depending on pools. However, joining a pool can bring steadier results if you don’t have too much hash rate on your own.
Best Mining Pools to mine from New Zealand
Finding mining pools with low latencies is what you should be after. If you live in New Zealand, some pools help you get less than 1% of stale shares, and we are going to list a few of them for you.
If have an AMD GPU, also check our guide for best mining pools that support these graphic cards.
Flexpool
Flexpool is used by plenty of miners in New Zealand and Australia too. Ping for these countries has been reported as around 30ms, so this is good enough for you to mine without having a headache with stale shares.
Flexpool is easy to set up, and its site has all information you might need to help you decide.
Unfortunately, Flexpool only mines Ether and Chia. Ether is absurdly profitable, and Chia isn’t very known but has seen a good rise in price recently.
Fees:
- 0,5% for ETH
- 0% for Chia
Nanopool
Nanopool has an Australian server, making it good enough for New Zealand miners. Moreover, it has a good array of currencies, allowing to join pools with other miners after Ether, Ether Classic, Monero, Zcash, Conflux, Ergo, and Ravencoin.
Nanopool is pretty straightforward, allowing to start mining within a few minutes.
Fees:
- 1%
Sparkpool
Sparkpool doesn’t feature any servers in Oceania, but it has three Asian servers (one in Taiwan, one for all Southeast Asia, and one in Mainland China). Reports from users in Oceanic countries show that Sparkpool allows them to mine without getting many stale shares.
At Sparkpool, it is possible to mine three coins: ETH, CKB, and BEAM.
Fees:
- 1%
Final Thoughts
Mining from New Zealand can be done without much trouble if you have the right equipment and join the right pool.
If you are a New Zealander just getting into crypto mining and don’t know whether the activity is legal in your country, you can rest assured that it is. In fact, New Zealand’s official government site has a page dedicated to teaching how mining works.
