Binance Pool

On April 2020 the famous exchange platform Binance launched Binance Pool, a mining pool for BTC. Now it's expanding with a new Ethereum pool with very low fees compared to its competitors, only 0.5% (Bitfly Ethermine is 1% for comparison), and, even better, no fees for the first month, so until december, 13th.

So I decided to give it a try and put my GTX 1060 at work with this new pool.

My setup

I was already using the mining software Ethminer, you can download it here: https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer (go to the Install paragraph), and after the download remember to add an exception for its folder on your antivirus: mining softwares are often recognized as malware.

The next step is going to https://pool.binance.com  and open a mining account there: if you're already registered on Binance all you have to do is log in with your credentials. Selecting "Mining account" in the user menu you will see a "Create mining account" button:

Use this to setup a new miner account (you can create up to 3000, to be used with different mining algorithms). This is the username you'll need to put in your Ethminer setup.

Miner configuration

Next, in my Ethminer folder, I created a new empty file called launch.bat, and I filled it with the following parameters:

setx GPU_FORCE_64BIT_PTR 0
setx GPU_MAX_HEAP_SIZE 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_SINGLE_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
ethminer.exe -U -P stratum+tcp://[miner_account].[worker_name]@ethash.poolbinance.com:1800

Replace [miner_account] with the username you just created on Binance, and [worker_name] with a name of your choice (it can be a number, a string, I just used "1" for mine).

The Stratum URL is ethash.poolbinance.com:1800. Other ports are available, and you can set them as backup if you like: 8888, 3333, 433, 25.

Start mining

Save the launch.bat file and double click on it to launch the mining software: after a while you should see something similar to this:

The green words mean that the miner is correctly processing the hashes and sending them to the Binance pool. What you should know is that, even if you put a random miner account, the pool will still accept your hashes but you will not earn anything! So you'd better check if the pool is really rewarding your account by going on the workers page:

On the left you can see that I have an active worker, and the grid on the right shows its name ("1") and the hashrate statistics.

Binance pool doesn't have a payment threshold: it will move your earnings on your wallet on a daily basis.

Conclusion

This is my first day with this new pool, so I don't know if it's reliable and stable as Ethermine yet. I don't even know what is going to happen after Ethereum will switch to the Proof-of-Stake consensus protocol, which doesn't include mining; but a mining pool with no fees was a too good opportunity to don't give it a try!