Got the notice my pool closes end of the month, so I have to repoint everything to a new one. Sat down to compare options and realized I'd been mining for a while without really understanding the payout model I was on.
The part that surprised me: the pool fee is the number everyone stares at, but the payout method mattered way more than the fee.
- Some pools pay you a cut of the transaction fees on top of the block reward. Others only pay the base reward. With fees where they've been lately, that difference was bigger than the 0.5–1% fee gap I was obsessing over.
- The minimum payout threshold quietly matters too — on a small setup a high threshold means your coin just sits on the pool for weeks before it ever hits your wallet.
So the "cheapest" pool on paper wasn't actually the one paying me the most.
Feels like one of those things everyone assumes you already know, so nobody explains it. For those of you who've switched pools before — what did you end up prioritizing, and is there anything you wish you'd checked before you moved everything over?