Next is Pool Mining. Since the difficulty is so high a lot of users will take part in pool mining. This is where your machines combine in a mining pool with all the other members machines to mine bitcoin in hopes of solving a block faster. There are a klot of pools out there. The most profitable one we use right now is Bitcoin Affiliate Network Mining Pool. They are one of the only Pay Per Share Mining Pools in existance. Most of the mining pools you will find are all PPLNS which means Pay Per Last N Submited shares. These pools (if to low of hashrates) will not pay you enough to cover your costs in electric. these pools are set up for Pool owner profit. Basically a PPLNS pool owner can set a pool up and own NO mining hardware and still collect a substancial amount of Bitcoins. 

BE WARNED, No matter if a PPLNS Pool says it has 0% fees or not, the pool owners still collect a HUGE amount of Bitcoins from its members work. A PPLNS pool only pays you a certain amount of Bitcoins per share but the catch is you only get paid for a certain amount of shares at the end of a block. So if it takes 72 hours to solve a block but the pool only pays you for 1 hour worth of shifts you will get paid for 1 hours of mined work you put in for the past 72 hours. Most PPLNS pool owners will tell you it is to prevent pool hopping and have several handfuls of other excuses why they use a PPLNS system. But honestly, its because a PPLNS pool is the most profitable to the pool owners. To prove it to yourself, if a pool operated on a 0% or even 1% to 2% fee to run their pool, what incentive would they have to keep it opened, How would they pay for the servers, how would they pay the fee for the website? If it was not profitable they would not do it. If it was not drastically profitable, most pools out there would not be PPLNS pools. Business is business, truth is truth. And in this website we are here to serve plate fulls of truth based on mining experience. 

In addition as you read about PPLNS Pools the biggest excuse they use is it prevents pool hopping, This is a flat out lie, becasue a PPLNS pool is perfect for pool hopping actually. You can look over their history and figure out roughly when to get in on a shift so you put in exactly the amount of time they pay for. So if a pool has a 2 to 4 hour work shift in their Paid shares you know to "HOP" into that pool in what you feel may be the last 2 to 4 hours of their shift for a solved block. I know because I purposely Pool hop on a few pools so I am not pushing a massive amount of hash to a pool and not getting a reward for all of my work. the lower a pools hashrate the easier it is to guesstimate how long it will be before they solve a block.

In order to Pool Mine you will need to download a version of CGMiner or BFG Miner to run your equipment on. You will need to download the correct mining software for the right algorythim Sha-256 or Scrypt. Also know you can not mine SHA coins with scrypt machines or vice versa. I do not use BFG Miner for Scrypt mining because I do not like its hashrates.

Once you get the mining software you will need command lines (Batch Files) that look similar to this

CGMiner 3.3.1 for Scrypt Mining

cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://asia1.coinking.io:7777 -u cyberpinoy.zeus1 -p x --chips-count 24 --ltc-clk 250 -S //./COM7 --nocheck-golden

pause

CGMiner 4.4.1 for SHA-256 Mining

cgminer.exe --icarus-options 115200:1:1 -o stratum+tcp://west1.bitcoindigger.com:3333 -u cyberpinoy.rbox -p x --rock-freq 290

pause

BFG Miner 4.7.0 SHA-256 Mining

bfgminer -S rockminer:all -o stratum+tcp://geo.bitcoindigger.com:3333 -u cyberpinoy.rbox -p x

pause

As you can see you have to tell the miner the website and port to your mining pool, your username and your password. You can also alter the intesity of your miners by playing with a FREQ command. But please research before you play with thesee numbers, adjusting these figures to high will burn up your miners. Make sure to view the readme files that come with both miners to better help you set ecerything up correctly. 

TAKE NOTE: the Batch files you see above are set up specifically for certain machines and unless you have the exact machines like the ones we have , they will not work for you. 

Some machines come with a Raspberry Pi controller, these machines will have their own browser interface where you will only need ton input the pool website, username and password and they will begin mining once you click start. You access these miners by putting their IP address in the browser. EX> 192.168.1.215. then this will open a control panel for your miner. Some miners require a password to access them others do not.