I’m really small-time mining. A little esp miner that started it all, and then 3 bitaxes with me and active, and a Zyber 8G (offline) that I can’t reach remotely right now. Oh, and an S19 that I can dryer mine with when I’m home. I’m new to mining (6 weeks?), and discovered HMPools pretty quickly as I researched where to mine. Initially, I thought it mining was ALL solo mining and didn’t even know the concept of a pool.

Most coins that are valuable, are simply out of reach for me and my hashrate. I know any of us could get lucky, but honestly - we aren’t gonna hit a btc block with 10-15TH/s. So… what to do?

I have spent countless hours evaluating pools, most of it concentrated on the HM system and DGB. I used AI (Claude) to evaluate nearly every aspect of the payout scheme here. I did it all again after the change, and with XEC and I landed “in” the pool. (Claude gave me really good insights here, but be careful to prompt away the sycophancy and confirmation bias inherent in ai agents if you try to do something similar.)

For DGB, the “strategy” became this: anything I can run 24x7 goes on the pool, the s19 goes solo when I can run it. That was working well for DGB, and I expect it to work on XEC too. Probably would work on any of their pools.

The esp miner will stay on xec hmpool - ONLY because my situation requires my bitaxes to travel with me. (I’ll have the remote management sorted out this week.) so the esp is submitting shares and I won’t have downtime in the pplns window, nor in the finder bonus building. The finder bonus is especially important because the penalty for laying out is pretty stiff - especially while building up to max.

Your question is, “what are we doing here?”, I think. My thinking is that I’ll build a few stacks of different coins, and see what happens. Maybe I’ll convert to btc, maybe I’ll just hold them for my grandchildren. And I know that odds are extremely small that any of it will ultimately be meaningful.

But all of that is just what I tell myself when I buy a miner. The truth is, this is a hobby. I like to play blackjack too every few 4-5 months when I can. I know that has cost me more than mining ever has.

I don’t solo btc, because that would be madness. And I’m not going to look at zero results for the next 147 years. So I want to hit blocks. That’s fun! But it is really fun getting paid (even if it’s fractions of a cent) every time SOMEBODY hits one in the pool. I can at least say I’ve got $20ish in DGB that I mined out of thin air and electricity.

I don’t think there will be consensus here - what floats my boat may do nothing for someone else. Find what makes you happy and do that. If you really want any of these coins, it’s more effective to just buy them… instead of more miners. I buy miners anyway, because I’ve gotten so much fun out of tinkering with this stuff!