If you have read my article "How to mine Burst Coin and all it`s noteworthy tasks beside" you maybe ask yourself what´s next? You have plotted your hardware sucessfully but you don´t know where to go now.
Well, finding a pool is not as easy at it sounds. All pools have different requirements for successful mining. Some pools only wants big miners with hundreds of terrabytes, some of them want just small miners with a few up to 10 TB. I try to explain, what you need to observe to get a good mining pool for your needs.
The most informatic and detailed overview you will find at http://burstcoin.cc/pool. The details inside this table are not 100% correct because the stats are changing every second or minute. If you open that website, you see a list with pools and the columns Blocks mined, Blockfinder, Miners, Earnings and Balance.
A good chance you will have on pools where Blocks mined, Blockfinders and Miners doesn´t distinguish too much. To have a good balance between now is not really probably anymore, there are too much miners with too high storage.
One rule is, the more miners are mining, the harder to get some rewards with a low amount of storage because the mining is devided up to all miners. That doesn´t mean that everybody get the same amount. No, everybody get´s paid proportinally to his action. The more storage you can provide, the more inset you have, the more rewards you get.
Let´s say you have a plotted storage about 5TB, then I recommend to looking for a pool with less miners. For example, at the time of writing this article, take a look at pool.burstpay.net. It has 29 Blocks found, 5 Blockfinders and 78 miners. This seems to be not overloaded and have a good balance. You should take a look at similar pools, which are not overloaded and have a good result. Now, open up the website of that pool and check the miners. On most pools, there are stats about deadline, shares and capacity of the miners. Near every pool has it´s King-Miners with up to 1000TB, you shouldn´t be disturbed because of the large storages. But you need to look if there are also some small miners like you. If you didn´t find any small miners, it is possible that there is a minimum storage at the pool. Not on every pool it is stated how high should be the minimum capacity. If it is stated out and is higher than yours, leave the pool. If you mine nevertheless, you possibly get banned.
If you find some small miners, check their rewards. On most pools, there is a history of payouts, here you can check how many Bursts a miner has been received. Another important value is the deadline. The deadline points out when a miner has win a mining round and generate a current mined block. The higher the deadline, the more difficult it is to get shares. Shares are in very, very easy words, the proportion of your work on the total work of pool. With lower capacity, you might be in a level between 0,01% and 5%, with a higher capacity, let´s say about 300TB, you can get near to 50% and up.
To give an approximate direction, with 5TB I get about 250 Burst coins within 30 days. But, you have to keep in mind, the more Burst coins are mined in the future, the more difficult it is to find blocks and the more difficult it is to get rewards.
Conclusion
with a low amount of storage (low=up to about 20TB), look for a pool with less miners and high blocks found.
with a high amount of storage, you can check every pool
check the minimum storage a pool wants to have
check the minimum payout time. Some pools have 30 days, some 1 day, some minimum 250 Bursts, some 10 Bursts etc
check the payment history and how many rewards the miners get in which time
I will show you how to mine at pool.burstpay.net with the BlagoMiner which is integrated in your Burst wallet.
You have found a pool and you want to start. An important detail is: You need minimum 1 Burst at your wallet to start mining. If you have none, you can ask for a donation inside a Burst forum or another forum of miners, you can visit a Burst Faucet or you can buy some Bursts and transfer them from the exchange to your wallet. If you have your Burst, open your wallet and select Tools->Mine. You need to fill four fields Mining server, Update server, Info server and target deadline. The first three fields should be pool.burstpay.net and the target deadline is 2592000 (every pool has it´s own target deadline). After that, import your plotted files in the bottom section and hold on. Do not press "start mining" now...wait!
Now open "How to mine" on the pools website and follow the instructions. First you have to open https://wallet.burstpay.net/rewardassignment.html in a new tab. Here you will see two fields you have to fill with
a) your passphrase which is the password to enter your wallet and
b) the reward receipient which is the pools Burst account Adress like BURST-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX
If you have entered all, then press "submit", there should be a very long message on your browser´s new tab. If you will have an error, then it´s only a short line with the word error. If everything works fine, press "start mining" in your wallet.
This will start the BlagoMiner and opens a command window where you can see that the mining starts. Now you have to wait for about 4 Blocks until your adress is verified. It´s possible that you get some error messages like that the reward receipient doesn´t match the pools burst adress. Ignore it for the first four messages. After four blocks, the error message should go away and you should see a green line with the words "confirmed DL". If this not happens after let´s say about 10 Blocks, then you have done something wrong and should go exactly through the steps again.
But be aware, every try or every time you change the reward recipient, no matter if you made something wrong, will cost 1 Burst. Be sure you have done everything correctly if you don´t want to spend too much Bursts for nothing.
Now you are mining. Be patient, you probably have to wait up to a month until you get your rewards. If you get them and it feels too less, try another pool. But be aware of pool hopping, no pool community likes to see that. If you have found a pool, stay there for some weeks and enjoy mining.
If you have to pause sometimes or the connection get´s disturbet, you can just start the BlagoMiner again and put the information inside. No need to visit the website again to registrate, no more taxes to pay.