What is the best Ethereum mining pool? Once you build an Ethereum mining rig, this is the next question you’ll want to know the answer to.

The best Ethereum mining pool should have the following characteristics:

• High Uptime – You don’t want to connect your rigs to an Ethereum mining pool that is down and not making you money for an hour or two every day.
• Low Mining Fees – Most pools charge 1-2% mining fees for their services. Anything more than that, and you’re basically just giving away your hard earned ETH profits.
• Reasonable Minimum Payout – This is especially important if you only have one mining rig, since you don’t want your payout to take potentially a week or more of mining to arrive in your account. Most Ethereum mining pools payout when the mined amount accumulates up to 0.05 – 0.2 ETH.
• Ethereum Mining Reward System – Without taking too much of a deep dive into the technical side, the Ethereum mining reward system utilized by a mining pool falls into two basic methods: PPLNS and PPS.
  1. PPS stands for Pay Per Share. This means that every share you mine has a specific value to the Ethereum mining network and that’s what you get paid during the pool’s payout. If you mine off and on (or your WiFi drops in and out) over any given period of time, this is the payment type you want.
  2. PPLNS stands for Pay Per Last n Shares. This is more of a variable number based on the luck of the pool. So, if the pool gets lucky and mines more blocks in a given timeframe, you’ll get a bigger payout. Of course, if the mining pool is unlucky, you’ll get less of a payout. If you’re mining 24/7 and don’t drop connection frequently, you’ll get roughly 4% more ETH using PPLNS vs PPS for Ethereum mining.
• Does the Ethereum Mining Pool pay Uncles? And furthermore, what is an Ethereum Mining Uncle? No, we aren’t talking about your family tree here. Again, without getting too technical, Uncles, in Ethereum mining, are orphaned network blocks that miners (mining pools) are incentivized to include in their mining. Uncle mining is rewarded because it helps secure the Ethereum network by making the network “heavier”. More information about Uncles can be found here.
• Ethereum Mining Difficulty Adjustment –  Most mining pools use VARDIFF on their mining pool connections. What does VARDIFF mean? VARDIFF means ‘variable difficulty’. When you connect to a mining pool using variable difficulty, the difficulty of your mining shares will rise and fall based on your hash rate. Your share difficulty will fluctuate such that your mining rig will vary share submission between 4-10 shares per minute. This reduces the load on the mining pool’s server backend while making your miner shares more efficient in terms of helping the mining pool find blocks. Since most pools use this feature, it really doesn’t have much bearing on your choice of which Ethereum mining pool is the best to use.

List of the Best Ethereum Mining Pools for 2017

I’ve listed these in the order I would recommend them to any friend just getting started with building a mining rig and starting to earn passive income with Ethereum mining. This is simply a list of known ethereum mining pools. No pool operators pay me to list their website here.

1. NanoPool  – I’ve used this mining pool on several moderate sized deployments of mining rigs and have never had an issue. They have a responsive Twitter account (@nanopool_org) and are very helpful if you’re encountering issues with their pool.
2. EtherMine.org – I have a friend who’s been using this pool to mine since 2015 and has had no issues. Their website is easy to use and includes plenty of how-to documentation.
3. Mining Pool Hub – Yet another large ethereum mining pool.
4. DwarfPool – This pool is anything but a dwarf as it runs about 5% of the entire Ethereum network as of the time of this writing.
5. NiceHash – This isn’t exactly an Ethereum mining pool, but I though I’d list it here as another option. Basically, you run the NiceHash miner software and NiceHash mines the current most profitable cryptocurrency on the backend. They payout in Bitcoin.

Other Mining Pools

• https://www.alpereum.ch/ – Swiss-based mining pool
• https://eth.waterhole.io/ – China-based mining pool
• http://noobpool.com – Name says it all. They cater to mining noobs!
• https://www2.coinmine.pl/eth/ – Several mining pool nodes in Europe and North America

That about covers the Ethereum mining pools I am aware of. Feel free to add more pool recommendations in the comments below and I’ll add them to the list.

Happy Mining!

Sidenote: If mining isn’t your thing, and you are just interested in purchasing some cryptocurrency as part of your investment portfolio, I personally use and recommend FTX Global Crypto Exchange (Use FTX US if a US resident)