pool.ms - Universal sandbox pool for miners and mining client developers
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Cryptocurrency Mining, Crypto, Minerstat, Mining

At the end of 2018, we made a draft and design of our new upcoming tool - benchmark. We knew from the start that the main focus of our benchmark must not be only to get the speeds - we wanted to give you more.

We are in the mining business for long enough now to know that the benchmarking always goes hand in hand with the question: “Where will the coins from benchmarking go?” We wanted to make this as straightforward and transparent as possible - and give the coins to the one that mines (as opposed to benchmarking to our own wallets). On the other hand, sometimes a miner doesn’t care where the coins go as he is only after the speed information (either to set up the profit switch or to test that new mining client that just came out) or doesn’t have time or knowledge to decide where and how to mine.

For the first situation, the solution was actually the easiest as you can define config templates and benchmark with config templates directly. This means that you are in control to set which pool you will use for the benchmark, which coin you will mine during the benchmark, to which wallet will you mine, and most importantly, which overclocking and config settings will you use to get the most precise information as possible.

The second goal required much more thinking, designing, programming, and testing so we could get it out to you. The solution needed to be simple, easy to use, and available for all possible scenarios. That’s why we have created the pool.ms - a universal sandbox pool, which isn’t available only to minerstat users but to anyone that wants to benchmark or test mining clients.

About pool.ms

pool.ms (sounds just like pool minerstat - see what we did here? 😏) is a universal sandbox pool. “Sandbox” means that there are no actual blocks found, there is no reward, and there are no payouts to anyone. It is a pool whose sole purpose is testing.

Even though there is no reward from mining on the pool, the mining client will show speeds, temperature, fans, power consumption, and other information it reports normally as if you are really mining. This way, you will be able to quickly check what is your performance on a specific algorithm without having to find a proper pool, port, and wallet for it.

Anyone can connect to the pool.ms with any client and mine any algorithm. The default port is 4443, but for some algorithms, a specific port is required. All ports are displayed on the website. At the moment of writing, we support over 70 algorithms.

stratum+tcp://pool.ms:4443

The reason why we haven’t closed this pool to be minerstat-only is to give something back to the community. Either you are a mining client developer, a coin developer, a mining manager, a miner that likes to test different algorithms and mining clients, or even a mining monitoring software, you can use the pool.ms to test things out or to benchmark your setup. We are all in this together.

If you find any issues or errors, we would be happy to hear about it. We hope that pool.ms will help you find some good hashrates!

Happy mining!

Explore the stratums that are available on pool.ms