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I have tried to set up a mining pool with my home computers. I am running bitcoind on one machine, and the others, also running bitcoind, were started with --url and --userpass to my central bitcoind server.

Now, are these machines already forming a mining pool? Or am I missing something?

What other software should considered for a home mining pool?

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  • ok, so no one actually answered a direct question. So, I'll ask it directly. What software do I need, and operating system, hardware, etc, in order to start a public pool, for several coins? I know it may be hard, and I know it will have to be kept up with, daily. I want to insure payouts are exactly correct. I want to be sure the blockchain is always the correct one to be mining on. I want to be sure things are kept private and secure. right down the line. I can buy whatever I need, if someone will just let me know the complete story. More and more pools are opening, and the software seems to – user11154 Dec 20 '13 at 20:19
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You can create a private mining pool with just bitcoind. All mining software will work with it: just point the mining software at bitcoind's RPC port and use the appropriate RPC username/password.

bitcoind doesn't know how to do payouts or multi-user authentication, though, so public mining pools require additional software.

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    bitcoind cannot handle the load required to solo mine anymore. – Luke-Jr Jun 11 '12 at 2:35
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From what I understand, you only need one bitcoind instance on one machine, while other ones would only run miners that would connect to the bitcoind machine. Running more bitcoind than that is not necessary.

As for the software, you should look into P2Pool - it allows you to earn smaller amount of Bitcoins more often, meaning you'll get smaller variance. It won't decrease the amount of Bitcoins you earn on average though, meaning it doesn't cost you anything to use.

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    Except that P2Pool has for some reason been paying out only around 90% of what it should be expected to pay out over the last 6 months. Some think this is due to exceptionally bad l**k; others think there must be something wrong in the code. The true cause appears to be currently unknown. (See the blue line on p2pool.info/luck) – Chris Moore Jun 4 '12 at 8:16
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    It looks like p2pool's luck is -2 standard deviations. Pretty bad luck, but definitely within the realm of possibility even if everything is working correctly. (The chance that something like this or worse will happen completely randomly is about 2%). – Meni Rosenfeld Jun 6 '12 at 9:04
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Eligius offers SMPPS (low variance, predictable income) decentralized and centralized mining, but more relevant to your question, our mining pool software, Eloipool, is completely free and open source. It does require a Linux server, however, unless you have the Python skills to port it to Windows (the main issue is epoll).

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