Pool mining

Solo mining is fine if you have a meaningful share of network hash rate. At small share, blocks are rare and lumpy — months between hits is normal. Pools aggregate hash rate from many miners and pay out proportional shares, so you get steady smaller payouts.

Community pools

Two community-run pools are currently active. Both are operated by third parties — check each pool's site for connection details, fee schedule, payout threshold, and any stratum/proxy software they ship.

Things to look at on each pool's site before pointing miners at it:

• Fee — typically 1–3 % of rewards.
• Payout scheme — PPLNS, PPS, etc. They distribute variance differently.
• Minimum payout threshold — make sure it's achievable for your hash share.
• Stratum / submission protocol — what miner software does the pool support? Is there a reference config?
• Operator transparency — public contact, recent operational history.

Payouts go directly to the EXFER address you configure with the pool; the pool never custodies your funds, only your share-accounting work. You can verify every payout via get_address_utxos against your address.

Self-hosted mini-pool

If you control multiple miners (a small farm), the simplest pool-like setup is just running multiple exfer mine instances all paying the same pubkey. Periodically sweep the pubkey's UTXOs to a cold wallet.

It's not share-accounting in the traditional pool sense — it's just multiple miners under one identity — but it captures the "steady payouts" property without trusting a third-party operator.

When solo is the right call

• You have a meaningful share (≥ 1 %) of network hash rate.
• You can tolerate variance in payout timing.
• You distrust pool operators on principle.

In those cases Solo mine is what you want.