Vertcoin was created as a digital peer-to-peer payment system, making it quite similar to well known cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin.

There’s a major distinguishing difference in Vertcoin that makes it very attractive to individuals – it is ASIC resistant. While most people might not appreciate this difference, I’m guessing you do, since you’re reading an article on Vertcoin mining pools. ASIC resistance makes Vertcoin and ideal choice for the individual home mining enthusiast.

Vertcoin is somewhat unique as it has remained true to the original vision of cryptocurrencies, which was a financial system owned by the users, where everyone is their own bank.

Vertcoin has a market cap of $33.7 million as of August 2018 and one VTC is roughly $0.74. This is way below the all-time high of $9.38 hit in December 2017. Basically the price has been slipping lower all throughout 2018 along with the broader market. Even at these low levels VTC remains a profitable coin for mining.

Vertcoin uses a consensus protocol you may not have heard of called Lyra2REv2. This is an ASIC-resistant protocol, which is keeping with Vertcoin’s mission to remain decentralized and free of ASIC mining. One factor to consider when mining VTC is that the Lyra2REv2 protocol works best with Nvidia GPUs.

Vertcoin Mining Software



Image via Fotolia

You can use the popular and reliable CCMiner software for mining Vertcoin. Or, if you are new to mining and not technically inclined you can use the One-click Vertcoin Miner, which is basically a graphical interface of CCMiner. Your hashrate will be a bit lower with the One-click Miner, but it is easier to setup and the difference isn’t huge, so it is a compromise worth making.

Once you’ve downloaded the software you’ll need to decide which mining pool you’re going to use, and you’ll also need a Vertcoin wallet. It’s recommended that you use the Vertcoin Core wallet if you’re going to be mining.

What is a Mining Pool?

You could go it alone and solo mine Vertcoin, but unless you’ve got a very powerful rig with 8 GPUs there’s little chance of finding a block. Using a mining pool is far better as it allows you to combine your hash power with that of many other users. That combined power can more easily find blocks, and the block rewards are then distributed between all the miners in the pool based on their contribution to the pool’s hash power.

In short, if you solo mine you might not find a block for months, but with a Vertcoin mining pool you can get a small amount of coins every day.

Now that you know how a mining pool can help you let’s look at the features you should be looking for when choosing a Vertcoin mining pool.

What to Look for in a Vertcoin Pool

Features to look for in mining pools are pretty standard from one coin to the next. Here are the main features you’ll want to consider when choosing a Vertcoin mining pool:

Trustworthy – You don’t want to use your processing power only to have the pool walk away with the rewards. You need a trustworthy pool that’s known to pay reliably.

Fees – Most mining pools will charge a fee for using their services, this is to pay for the pool servers, and to provide some small compensation to the pool owners. Obviously lower fees are better for you since you get to keep more of your coins, but sometimes it’s acceptable to pay a higher fee. For example, P2Pool mining has no fees, but can be troublesome to setup and is also known to have more invalid blocks.

Location – Where the pool servers are located is an important factor for you to consider. You want to have servers located as close to your location as possible. The closer the server the lower the latency and the greater hash power you’ll be providing to the pool. Of course that means bigger payouts for you. So, if you’re in North America look for a pool with North American servers. Europeans should look for European servers and Asians should look for Asian servers, preferably in the same country.

Payout Scheme – This is something you’ll need to look at and decide how important it is to you. There are many different payout schemes offered by mining pools. Some are geared more towards luck, while others look to make payouts as fair as possible based on contributed hash power. Pay per Share (PPS) and Pay per Share Plus (PPS+) are two popular schemes that remove miner risk as the pool pays a flat payment for each share solved. Another popular payout scheme is Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) where payment is made as a % of shares they contribute to the total shares (N).

Minimum Payout – It’s not a huge thing, but the minimum payout amount might be important to you, especially if you’re not contributing much hash power. A smaller minimum payout might mean getting paid every few days, but a larger minimum payout may mean you have to wait several weeks to get paid.

Pool Hash Power – This is a tricky one. On the one hand you want to find the popular pool with the most hash power because that’s where the most blocks will be found. On the other hand you want to avoid centralization, so any time a mining pool has more than 25% of the hash power it’s a good idea to choose a different pool. This will foster decentralization and keep the network stronger and more secure.

Uptime – If you can find the uptime of the pool you should find one with an uptime as close to 100% as possible. Certainly greater than 95%. You can’t mine if the pool servers are down.

Vertcoin Mining Pools for 2019

With Vertcoin being such a popular coin for home miners there’s no shortage of available pools. So, I won’t be listing all of them, but I will give you a good selection of choices.

MiningPoolHub

MiningPoolHub is currently the most popular Vertcoin mining pool, with 31.2% of the pool hash rate. That’s a little bit high, but Vertcoin is pretty decentralized, and has forked in the past to avoid a botnet controlling more than 50% of the network hash power.



Vertcoin Miningpoolhub Statistics

There are global servers and the mining fee is a standard 0.9%. Minimum payouts are just 0.1%, making this a good choice for home miners.

AHashPool

AHashPool – This is the second most popular Vertcoin mining pool, with 22% of the pool hash rate. There’s a 1% fee for mining here. Servers are globally located. The payouts are a bit different here as the pool only pays out in BTC. There’s a minimum 0.003 BTC payout, and payouts are made once every 24 hours. The pool also does auto switching, so if you’re mining Lyra2REv2 the pool will mine whichever coin is most profitable.

Zergpool

Zergpool – Once you get below the top two Vertcoin mining pools you’ll find the hash rates are much smaller. In the case of Zergpool it is roughly 2% of the hash rate. The good news is that Zergpool has a very low 0.5% miners fee.



ZergPool Lyra2v2 Stats over past 30 days

Payments are made every 12 hours for balances over 0.0001 BTC equivalent. You can mine just Vertcoin, or you can use auto-switching to mine the most profitable coin.

EasyMine

EasyMine – This pool is similar in size to Zergpool, controlling about 2% of the hash rate. It is unique in that it allows merge mining where you can mine both Vertcoin and Unitus at the same time. The mining fee is 0.5% for Vertcoin and 1% for Unitus. Payouts are made every 12 hours and there’s no minimum.



Overview of Easymine Vertcoin Pool

There are quite a few other Vertcoin mining pools, but most have less than 100 active miners, and in some cases there are less than 10 or even no miners using the pool. If you want to see a more complete list there’s one here.

Conclusion

Vertcoin is an attractive coin for home miners since it is still profitable to mine the coin with your GPU. And the Vertcoin developers are committed to keeping it that way, so theoretically you should be able to continue mining Vertcoin with a home computer for as long as the network and coin exist.

If you’re just getting started with cryptocurrency mining Vertcoin seems a good choice, especially since it offers a graphical interface in its One-click Vertcoin Miner.

Featured Image via Fotolia & Vertcoin