May 2018 Update – Unfortunately Eclipse MC stopped running some time ago, this article remains online as a reference.
A look at Eclipse Mining Consortium’s Mining Pool
Please note: This review is based on a relatively small amount of hashing, a few hundred ghs. The stats outlined in this review may not apply to larger miners. We hacked our antminer S1’s to mine nine pools concurrently, letting us run proportional power across a wide variety of mining pools. This review is part of our series of bitcoin mining pool reviews.
We came across Eclipse Mining Consortium some time ago, but recently reactivated our account on them as we did a pencil mod to our antminers to get them back online. Going since 2012, they have mined nearly 6000 blocks in that time, although at time of writing this has dropped to about a dozen a month, with US and EU based servers.
Their site allows you to set up an account pretty quickly, with a decent mix of information, but no major functionality for some time. Some of the links to areas such as their forum are also not working, showing that there isn’t active development on this pool. But there’s a good selection of graphs and configurable options to let you keep on track of what your workers are doing for you. At time of writing (Jan 16), they had about 1.5 PHs mining on them.
Eclipse MC’s pool operates using two choices for payment. Firstly, they offer a Pay Per Share (PPS) payout option on which they charge a 5% fee, or for those who want to risk it, a Double Geometric Method (DGM) payout basis with no fees. They don’t offer merged mining, but do use vardiff so difficulty will be based on your hashing power.
Earnings accrue in your account, with an automatic payout option configurable. The minimum payout is 0.01, so if you’re mining with smaller hashing power, it can take some time to build up your earnings, especially with blocks taking some time to be found, but it does pay out in the end.
Communications options are straightforward, letting you receive emails when blocks are found, wallet address is changed, you’ve been paid, or a miner stops submitting shares. There is an option for buying credits with your mining earnings to get SMS alerts, but we didn’t test this. 2FA via Yubikey or Google Authenticator is available to secure your account, and you can lock your payout address, and the site uses https/
Adding workers and connecting to the pool is straight forward, and there is information on blocks found, and some graphs based on earnings over different periods. If you find the block, you can set the option to be shown for kudos, or for keep it private.
The pools site hasn’t changed in some time, and seems to be be up the whole time, although communication on their online channels seems to have dried up. There is some good documentation though, and the site is simple enough to use.
So in conclusion, Eclipse Mining Consortium’s Bitcoin Mining Pool is a long-standing pool that is probably well past it’s earning prime, but still offers bitcoin miners willing to back one of the (now) smaller fry in the overall bitcoin mining sector’s a good solid mining pool that continuing to find blocks nearly four years on from when it found it’s first block.
