Hello guys!
My name is Flavia and I’m here on behalf of Minergate, one of the oldest mining pools on the market.
I’m trying to find out, how many Bitcoin Gold miners have tried or are using our pool now? Seems that there are not so many.
And I would like to hear your opinion.
Also, feel free to ask any questions about mining, our software or how to set it up.
Looks like less than 1% use MinerGate. 
I experimented with Minergate in the past, before BTG existed. I found that I got better hashrates on ETH using other mining software - but that was over a year ago.
During the upgarde/hardfork to the new PoW algo on July 3, there was a major reshuffling of hashpower allocation among our pools.
Is Minergate competitive on BTG (and other Equihahs(144,5) algos)?
Other thoughts - we seem to be seeing an uptick in individual miners and small miners. Perhaps, for small miners, the higher minimum withdrawal at MinerGate dissuades them? Other BTG pools listed at mininpoolstats allow much smaller withdrawals. People like flexibility.
We also seem to have a growing level of interest from Asia, Russia, South America - do the app and your site offer any support for other languages to make the experience more inviting?
Hello! Thank you for the reply!
It is true, we contribute not so much into BTG mining in general. We have right at this moment 8.4 kSol/s of the world’s hashrate 3.0 MSol/s.
But we would like to increase it of course.
The withdrawal threshold now is 0.001 BTG. Personally I’m not aware of the thresholds on other pools.
Now we support offchain micro transactions to FreeWallet, that’s why it is possible to transfer really small amounts (e.g. 0.005 xmr).
In the last couple of days we’ve started the localization into Chinese. We have a big and strong community of Spanish and Russian speaking users. They communicate with each other in our web chat in special rooms.
The most traffic on MinerGate’s website goes from Russia and South America.
But unfortunately we don’t have tech support in this languages at the moment. However, Spanish and Portugal and Russian are quite well translated by Google, so normally all the issues get solved successfully anyway.
When I looked at mining pool stats from the link Bitcoin Gold (BTG) Equihash 144,5 | Mining Pools, on desktop, it showed your minimum withdrawal as 0.1. Perhaps you can reach out to them to get them to update their information.
Good. I believe the Asian regions are booming. Do you have Asian Stratum servers? If so, make sure to advertise that fact.
We don’t have Asian servers yet, but it’s a topic of discussion now too.
This withdrawal threshold 0.1 was sone kind of wrong info on our web page. The actual amounts are unique for each coin.
Might be worth looking into, to clarify… I’m not sure everyone else looks at it, but if I saw this when I was getting started, I’d probably reject Minergate. 
As a Canadian resident I use MPH on there US East server. I tried using bitpoolmining for about 2 days but switched back to MPH due lack of found blocks. I realize the BTG fork was recent but it would be nice to see some alternative pools to MPH.
There are plenty of alternatives… see: Bitcoin Gold (BTG) Equihash 144,5 | Mining Pools
Unless you plan to only mine for a couple of hours, even a pool which finds relatively few blocks will deliver the same long-term earnings, on average. The short term will have more variation, though - the inevitable distribution will have some long dry spells as well as the periodic super-profit period where two blocks come in a short time.
I mine 24/7 and do use that site to reference what pools are out there. Doesn’t latency play a factor in the amount of shares you get though? Seems like MPH is the only US east option.
Be aware that listing “US East” doesn’t mean that’s the only place with a stratum server there. Certain networking setups will automatically connect you to the closest server behind a given name - everyone sees Google servers that are local, but we all use the same name to access them.
In the past, I’ve pinged the available stratum servers to compare which is really closest to my location.
Yes, but it’s a really minor factor.
Say the latency is 50ms to one, and 200ms to another. What do you gain with 150ms?
The average blocktime for BTG is 10 minutes - that’s 600,000 ms. When a new block is found and new work is issued, using the distant server means you’re uselessly mining the old block for 150 more milliseconds.
150ms / 600,000ms = 0.025%
That’s 0.025% waste. If your earnings are about 1 BTG a week, and you earn 52 BTG per year… switching from a latency of 200ms to 50ms will mean you earn more like 52.013 BTG in the year.
Many other factors may make a bigger difference - like the pool’s fees, the pool’s reliability. For that matter, a pool that is overloaded may distribute new work more slowly - if the delay to send new work to everyone is 250 ms for a pool that’s 50ms away, and some other pool can send new work in 100 ms but is 200ms away, then your work efficiency is the same - either way, you get the new work 300ms after a block is found.
Note: all the numbers above are strictly hypothetical and do not represent any pool performance.
I am only thinking of trying it out