Monacoin Mining Pools: Best Places to Mine MONA

So you are a miner and you are looking to increase your profitability? It may make sense to join a mining pool.

Today I would like to look at the best Monacoin mining pools. Monacoin is the first Japanese cryptocurrency that was created in 2014. It is quite popular in the land of the rising sun, but not so well known in the West.

Monacoin was created as a peer-to-peer decentralized payment network and alternative currency using the Scrypt algorithm for consensus. It later changed algorithms as of block 450,000 and now uses the Lyra2REv2 consensus algorithm. This change was made to keep Monacoin ASIC-resistant at the time.

Interestingly, in early September 2018 there emerged rumors of an ASIC rig capable of mining the Lyra2REv2 algorithm. Monacoin hasn’t yet performed a hardfork to a different algorithm, but that is possible. There also haven’t been any reports of network difficulty increasing, which would be the sure sign of ASIC miners entering the space.

Pool Mining or Solo Mining Monacoin

It’s too early to say for sure, but it certainly looks as if the ASIC miners are taking their toll on the profitability of solo mining Monacoin as you can see here at WhattoMine.com. With that being the case I wouldn’t recommend solo mining (unless you have one of these Lyra2REv2 ASIC rigs), and instead you should focus your efforts on pool mining of Monacoin. You still won’t be profitable, but at least you’ll get coins regularly.

You see, pool mining allows you to combine your resources with that of other miners. With all that computing power combined the mining pool is more likely to find blocks more often. And then the block rewards are split between the miners in the pool.  

There are several different ways that rewards can be split, but at the end of the day they all end up being equivalent in the long run. With Mondacoin pool mining you’ll get coins more regularly, even if it’s just a small amount.

And even though Monacoin mining may not look profitable right now, if the cryptocurrency markets rally again and Monacoin sees a substantial price increase all the coins you mine now will be profitable.

Below I’ll go through several Monacoin pools to see what they offer and how they stand out from their peers. But first, I want to have a brief explanation of what you should be looking for when choosing an Monacoin mining pool, and in fact any mining pool for any coin.

What to Look for in a MONA Pool

If you’ve read any of our previous articles about mining other coins you know that the features to look for in mining pools are very similar from coin to coin. With that in mind I’ll give you the shortened version, but if you need more details about what features to look for in a mining pool you can check out the Bitcoin Gold mining pool piece for a more detailed description of each feature.

Fees: The lower the better. 1% is average, but if you can get a lower fee you’ll keep more coins for yourself.

Server Location: Closer is better. The pool should at least have servers on the same continent as you. Generally the larger pools are global, so this rarely becomes a problem.

Trustworthy: You want to be sure that the pool is going to pay you, and that they are going to pay you fairly for the hashing power you’re adding to the pool. Have a look at some online reviews and see what the community thinks before you jump into any mining pool.

Payout Scheme: As I mentioned above there are several payout schemes, but in the long run they all equal out to the same amount of coins in your wallet.

Pool Uptime: Look for a pool with uptime as close to 100% as possible. A pool that’s down is a pool that’s not mining. 

Minimum Payout: Lower minimums are always better because it means you’ll get paid more quickly.

Pool Hash Power: Some people look for the highest hash power possible, under the assumption that this is the pool finding the most blocks. That might be true, but there are also more miners to split the rewards with. Even worse, if everyone chooses the largest mining pool it keeps getting larger and eventually controls the network. That’s bad for decentralization, and bad for the network. Stick with mining pools that have 25% or less of the network hashing power whenever possible.

Best Monacoin Mining Pools

Now that you know what you need to look for in choosing the right pools, let's take a look at some of best pools that you can join. Some of these pools will give you the opportunity to mine Monacoin specifically while others let you choose the mining algorithm and they choose the most profitable coins.

This is also not an exhaustive list and there may be other pools that are not included that have reasonable Monacoin hashing power.

VipPool.net

Not surprisingly for a coin that bills itself as the first cryptocurrency made in Japan, VipPool.net is the largest Monacoin mining pool and it is based in Japan. The pool controls just under 50% of the hash power on the network.

As far as I can tell there is no mining fee at VipPool.net, but unless you can read Japanese you’ll have to choose another pool, since the VipPool.net website is only in Japanese. That’s ok though, because with nearly 50% of the hashing power you’d want to choose a different pool anyway.

MiningPoolHub

MiningPoolHub is currently the second most popular Monacoin mining pool, with roughly 25% of the pool hash rate. That’s a little bit high, but Monacoin is pretty decentralized, and given the number of pools involved in mining it’s probably ok to mine through them.

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. It also supports multi-algorithm switching, changing to the most profitable coin in the algorithm if you like. And you can get pay-outs in any coin you like, even when mining Monacoin.

F2Pool

F2Pool is one of the largest integrated mining pools in the world, and it’s also the third largest Monacoin mining pool, controlling roughly 15% of the hashing power. That actually makes it a pretty good choice as you’ll help to decentralize the network. It’s also a sign that ASICs aren’t that prevalent in Lyra2REv2 mining yet because F2Pool is based in China and is normally very heavily influenced by ASIC miners.

One really negative aspect of F2Pool is the high 4% mining fee. It also isn’t the best choice if you want to remain anonymous because you have to register an account in order to mine with F2Pool. On the upside, the minimum payout at F2Pool is just 10 MONA and they payout once a day.

ZPool

Zpool.ca is a large pool that mines dozens of algorithms and over 100 different coins. While you can request payment in MONA, and the minimum is just 0.05MONA, it could still take time to get paid as the pool may have to wait until a Monacoin block is found before payments can be made.

They currently only guarantee BTC payments, and you can mine Monacoin, but get paid in Bitcoin if you like. Note that with Zpool you choose the algorithm and Zpool decides which coin in the algorithm is most profitable to mine. This means you might not be mining Monacoin at all times if you’re mining Lyra2REv2 because there are 13 different coins with that algorithm and Monacoin is rarely the most profitable.

The pool mining fee is a reasonable 1.25% and there are global servers so no need to worry about location. Hash power varies as the pool changes from coin to coin, but is generally 10% or less.

Aapool.org

Aapool.org is a smaller Monacoin mining pool with roughly 5% of the hashing power. The mining fee is a bit on the high side at 2%, but the 0.1MONA minimum payout is good. They have global servers so can be accessed by anyone.

The information on the website is a bit sparse, so if you aren’t familiar with setting up mining software Aapool.org may not be your best choice.

Conclusion

Monacoin has its roots in Japan, but based on the mining pool activity it has been spreading its wings. While it strives to remain ASIC resistant, there does seem to be some progress being made by the ASIC manufacturers to create a rig that can mine the Lyra2REv2 algorithm, which means we could see a fork from Monacoin soon, or another algorithm change.

The coin isn’t currently profitable using your GPU, but with the price severely depressed from the start of 2018 all it would take is a small rally to make the coins being mined today quite profitable in the future.

There are plenty of good Monacoin mining pools to choose from, so there’s no reason not to get started mining the first Japanese cryptocurrency.