F2pool – Mining pool

F2pool mining pool has an important place in the cryptocurrency market ecosystem. The developers of the platform have attracted several million miners to mine digital assets, thanks to the platform’s open source code and continuous improvement of the interface.

F2pool managed to survive the most difficult period in its history – the ban on mining and working with clients from China. The service has held the third highest level of Bitcoin mining, and has provided almost 100% support for the functioning of altcoins: HyperCash, VCash, Verge, DigiByte, Ravencoin Classic, DigiByte and Monacoin.

History

F2pool appeared in April 2013, the platform started without a brand name, taking the name from the nickname of one of the administrators – “Discus Fish”. It is unknown for certain whether he had anything to do with the creation of the largest mining pool. The identities of the founders remain anonymous to this day, which turned out to be a prudent move given the future persecution of miners by the Chinese authorities.

At the time of F2pool’s launch, China was the leader in Bitcoin mining. In 2014, the platform accounted for 25 percent of the main cryptocurrency’s hash rate. Later, F2pool was accused of trying to take over 51% of the network, which is almost impossible nowadays.
Currently, the service operates through the official website https://www.f2pool.com/.

https://www.f2pool.com/.

Pool Statistics

F2pool currently mines 14.4% of the Bitcoin hashrate. The cloud pool supports co-mining with BTC altcoins: HTR, ELA and NMC. A similar scheme of simultaneous mining of Litecoin cryptocurrency together with Dogecoin is available to customers.
In total, F2pool is open for mining 38 types of digital currencies. The most profitable to work with the service for those algorithms and coins with the highest percentage of hash rate. These statistics are shown on the independent resource MiningPoolStats:

As you can see from the table below, F2pool takes from 2.5% to 5% commission, using two types of charging PPS rewards – reward for each balloon sent and combined method PPS+.

Registration

The F2pool website supports 4 language options, among which there is no Russian language, but these problems can be solved by resorting to an online translator.
Registration is available on the main page through the option “Create account”, located in the upper right corner of the site. The user can additionally download the F2pool mobile application for IOS and Android.

Personal Account will open to the user after completing the registration form, where it is necessary to come up with a username and password, as well as specify an email address. This is necessary to receive an email with a registration confirmation link.

Once in the Personal Area, the user can configure additional security settings in the form of two-factor 2FA verification using the security settings.
Before the start of mining, the client needs to add a wallet to receive the remuneration. It is linked under “Mining accounts” (1), where the “Payout settings” (2) option displays a list of cryptocurrencies.
After selecting the desired type, the user must click Add address (3).

The wallet address is copied and pasted in the window that appears. The operation should be confirmed by SMS or 2FA-identification, after which the client will receive an email with an activation link. It can be changed at any time at the wish of the miner, but in this case the payments will be frozen for three days.

Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash mining

Bitcoin is mined using SHA 256 algorithm on ASIC miners which can mine any coin with similar consensus. Working with the F2pool pool, miners get HTR, ELA, and NMC coins along with BTC through a co-mining system, earning additional profits.

Clients must:

• Pre-add wallet addresses to receive HTR, ELA and NMC digital currencies
• Prescribe stratum + tcp: //btc.f2pool.com: 3333 address in the miner

F2pool service offers its clients smart-mining service, which consists in automatic switching of client’s ASIC-miner to BTC or BCH, depending on the benefit of the amount of payments.
There used to be a Bitcoin SV fork in this system, but at the time of writing the pool has withdrawn its support.

Smart mining is set up on the SHA 256 d algorithm, which requires the trader to:

• Create a new or additional account
• Enter stratum+tcp://sha256d.f2pool.com:6100 address in miner

Mining Ethereum

Ethereum cryptocurrency is mainly mined on farms (rigs) made up of the company’s video cards and ASIC miners with memory capacity expanded to 6 GB. F2pool accounts for 27.5% of the ETH block hashrate.

If you have ASIC-miner, F2pool client should attach the wallet for ETH receipt in Personal Area and write the address of stratum-server (any of the mentioned):

• stratum+tcp://eth.f2pool.com:6688
• stratum+tcp://eth-backup.f2pool.com:6688

When using Ethereum mining through a video card farm, the user needs to decide on the software that is best suited for their GPU model. The list of mining software is located on a separate page at https://www.f2pool.com/tools

Select the GPU Miners section (1), specify the type of ETH cryptocurrency to be mined (2), the operating system of the computer running the farm (3), the manufacturer of the video card along with the memory size (4) and click the download link.

After receiving and unpacking the archive into a separate folder, find there a file like start.bat or start.cmd, which you need to open for editing by right-clicking and selecting the “Edit” option in the drop-down menu.

Editing the “batnick” is performed depending on the type of the selected miner program:

• Example for PhoenixMiner: “PhoenixMiner.exe -epool eth.f2pool.com:6688 -ewal name-account-name_worker-pass x”
• Example for lolMiner: “lolMiner.exe -algo ETHASH -pool eth.f2pool.com:6688 -user name_account-name_worker
• Example for Bminer: bminer -uri ethproxy: // account_name. nameg_worker@ eth.f2pool.com: 6688

Only download mining software from the repository at github. You can find examples of editing “batons” on the software developers’ pages.

Please note that due to high commissions in Ethereum network, the threshold to withdraw profit to a wallet is 0.1 ETH, which the farm will have to mine for a long time.

F2pool offers an alternative scheme to withdraw rewards through a partner – cryptocurrency exchange MEXC Global, by withdrawing accrued funds to the Loop Alliance network.

Alternative withdrawal of rewards in ETH

F2pool customer can withdraw the daily income from ETH mining without paying high commissions to the deposit of cryptocurrency exchange MEXC Global, which will require registration on the site and get the Loop Alliance wallet address.

In the top corner of the MEXC Global homepage, click the “Register” option and fill in the account details box. Make up and confirm the password, get and confirm the code from the letter you received to the e-mail address specified.

Log in to your account and choose Loop Alliance as deposit method.

On the network page in the deposit options window, you need to find ETH Loop. After you click on this line, in the right corner you will see the wallet address, which is different from the usual format of Ethereum addresses.

The copied address must be added to the F2pool account by selecting the section with the Ethereum cryptocurrency.

If the client already had a different address added, it is necessary to go through the procedure of replacing it. After that, rewards will start coming daily at the beginning of the day, even if the reward is less than 0.01 ETH.

Litecoin and Dogecoin co-mining

F2pool has a 18.4% share of the Litecoin hashray, which provides profitable mining of “digital silver” together with this pool due to the high probability of finding blocks. The user receives payment for each balloon sent to the pool and an additional reward in the form of simultaneous Dogecoin mining.

LTC and DOGE are mined using the same Scrypt algorithm, thanks to the initiative of Litecoin and Dogecoin developers, who implemented a unified mining patch for better protection against 51% attacks.

Before launching the mining, the user must additionally bind a wallet to the account for the parallel DOGE rewards and prescribe the settings in the ASIC-miner:

• Stratum server stratum + tcp: //ltc.f2pool.com: 8888
• User name: name_account. name-worker
• Password – any chosen by yourself

Remuneration payments are made daily, subject to the minimum threshold of 0.02 LTC. The commission of the pool is equal to 4%.

Conclusion

F2pool cloud mining service has become a fundamental player in the cryptocurrency market, which strives to maintain a high brand reputation. This is evidenced by the cases of the return of erroneously sent high commission, steps to meet the miners who want to withdraw the deposit, for good reasons, less than the minimum threshold.

The partnership of the company with exchanges, allows customers to withdraw funds directly to the accounts of the exchanges, saving on commissions. F2pool plans to russify the service and connect second-tier solutions to save on high network charges.