Bitcoin wiki mining comparison

Reward types & explanation:

• CPPSRB - Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay. [1]
• DGM - Double Geometric Method. A hybrid between PPLNS and Geometric reward types that enables to operator to absorb some of the variance risk. Operator receives portion of payout on short rounds and returns it on longer rounds to normalize payments. [2]
• ESMPPS - Equalized Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but equalizes payments fairly among all those who are owed. [3]
• POT - Pay On Target. A high variance PPS variant that pays on the difficulty of work returned to pool rather than the difficulty of work served by pool [4]
• PPLNS - Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.
• PPLNSG - Pay Per Last N Groups (or shifts). Similar to PPLNS, but shares are grouped into "shifts" which are paid as a whole.
• PPS - Pay Per Share. Each submitted share is worth certain amount of BC. Since finding a block requires shares on average, a PPS method with 0% fee would be 25 BTC divided by . It is risky for pool operators, hence the fee is highest.
• Prop. - Proportional. When block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how much shares each of them has found.
• RSMPPS - Recent Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like SMPPS, but system aims to prioritize the most recent miners first. [5]
• Score - Score based system: a proportional reward, but weighed by time submitted. Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time since start of current round. For each share score is updated by: score += exp(t/C). This makes later shares worth much more than earlier shares, thus the miner's score quickly diminishes when they stop mining on the pool. Rewards are calculated proportionally to scores (and not to shares). (at slush's pool C=300 seconds, and every hour scores are normalized)
• SMPPS - Shared Maximum Pay Per Share. Like Pay Per Share, but never pays more than the pool earns. [6]

1. Note that pool hashrate is largely irrelevant but can be seen as a popularity measurement. Note however that it is a theoretical security issue if one pool gains above 50% of the total computational power of the network, thus consider joining a pool based on other metrics.
2. ↑ On or around October 18, 2013, the pool stopped payouts of mining earnings. 50BTC.com claims the pool was hacked and all mining earnings and records of the earnings were lost. They claim as a result, many people are blackmailing them with unrealistic claims.
3. ↑ On or around February 11, 2014, the pool failed to payout mining earnings. 50BTC.com claims their system was unable to deal with the transaction malleability problem. They claim this has been fully corrected.