List Of Mining Pools And Their Reward MethodsForum user organofcorti posts a handy resource for use in choosing a Mining pool.
Each entry in the list includes the listed pool’s hashrate, reward method and fee as well as a link to that pool’s discussion thread to further learn about each specific pool.
The first reply in the thread describes in more detail each of the reward methods.
In late November or early December 2012 the block award will be adjusted and in an instant the proceeds to miners (in terms of bitcoins mined) will drop by half, from 50 BTC to 25 BTC per block.
For most GPU miners, this does not simply mean the profits from mining will drop in half, this means their revenues will drop in half. For many, the cost of electricity to mine will likely exceed the revenue mining could even bring in.
The GPU miners that will still be able to compete with the more efficient FPGA mining underway now and the ASIC methods planned to become available in the next months are those whose cost of electricity is trivially low, such as the $0.03 per kWh level charged to those near hydro-generation.
Additionally spared will be those whose electric costs are subsidized – either by their government with subsidized electric rates or by their landlord when utilities are included in the cost of the rent.
Many GPU miners have already unplugged and liquidated their GPU rigs yet the mining difficulty has not just shattered the prior mining capacity record but difficulty is increasing at the fastest pace in over a year.
The choice of pool will help determine if those GPUs remaining can be milked all the way through to when the block reward adjusts or if it will end up being LED-lights out even sooner.