Highly discourage using multipool and ilk if you care at all about the coins you are mining. The hash-n-dash behavior of these pools overwhelm a chain with hash power causing difficult adjustments upwards, then disappear as quickly as the come leaving the network high and dry with hours or days between blocks. Coins have been destroyed this way.

Heck, even if you don't care about the underlying coins, it's simply not as profitable (because you decrease the value of the coins you mine before you even have a chance to sell them).

I would suggest that if a coin can be destroyed by a multipool it's probably not a viable coin and deserves to be destroyed.

Bitcoin at the beginning could've been destroyed by this behaviour, it's only the quirk of being first that means it couldn't have happened. In other words, your statement there is kinda pointless :/

Just about any coin could be destroyed by this behavior, if one or more of the large pools started acting as a multipool. Even Bitcoin could be hurt badly.

This is a problem of mis-aligned incentives that hurts everybody, not just particular coins.

In a similar vein, Waffle Pool is smaller (and thus less dangerous for network health), and is also a coin-hopping profit-focused pool. It is different (I think) in that it always mines multiple coins simultaneously, in order to prevent huge changes in the market based on what a big pool is mining. Since a big pool like Multipool can effectively move the market for smaller altcoins, it's probably useful to spread the hashing love around a little.

It does, however, pay out in Bitcoin only. So, if you're wanting to mine Doge and hold them, it's not the right choice. I have a Multipool miner running and I keep some of the proceeds in the coins that result; though I mostly sell the also-ran coins (anything that has nothing significant to differentiate it from Bitcoin) and trade them in for Bitcoin or Peercoin. I keep some Doge, however.

Multipool also has a huge share of the network hashing power, but is designed to hop between whatever happens to be the most profitable coin. So for someone looking to get into DOGE for fun, it's not the way to go.

They have both the profit-hopping hostname:port , and, a dedicated Dogecoin hostname:port. So if you only want to mine Dogecoin, you can do that.

Huh. Didn't know they had that option. But either way, along with #3 in the top level comment, Multipool also holds a massive share of the total network: http://i.imgur.com/n9xaRQo.png, and if a lot of that is profit-hoppers, when they change coins, that will leave Dogehouse with even more share.