How to Know What Pools Are Doing with Your Hashrate

I’m looking for a way to check what a solo mining pool pays out in block rewards. Also curious about what they make my miners do. Are they using my hashrate for other coins? How do pro miners find good pools? I heard some tools can help with this. What are they and how can I use them to get all the info?

Check out this post here for some insights. You can see where block rewards go plus other details. But if they’re merge mining other coins, you won’t always catch that. Honestly most of those are worth next to nothing anyway. Just stick with bigger pools and it should be fine. -Dave

About payment, pools usually have different methods like PPS+, PPLNS, and SOLO. If you want the lowdown on those, look up something like "How to Choose the Optimal Payment Method." With PPS+, you get fixed income, but PPLNS can be crazy with spikes because it relies on luck and fees. I switched to PPS+ and it’s way better for profit than PPLNS.

Not totally accurate though. For merge mining on RSK, you need to include specific OP_RETURN data in your Coinbase transactions. Like check transactions from Binance Pool they all show OP_RETURN with "RSKBLOCK..."

Fair enough, I didn't know about RSK until now, but does it even pay off? NMC and ELA don’t seem to add much to earnings. Honestly, I haven’t checked those in ages. Sure, you could find some merge coins, but pools aren’t gonna get rich off them while keeping it a secret. -Dave

If you have SSH access to your system, and you connect via domains not IP addresses, you can decrypt traffic between your miner and the pool. You'd need to set up new certificates signed by a CA. Getting a second machine that runs a CA to issue those certs is also a must. Not easy, but possible.