• Why is a pool good?
• Disadvantages of pools
• Summary, for me
• Questions people are asking about pools and Gridcoin

Why is a pool good?

• It might be easier for newcomers to get started, e.g. you might get faster GRC this way (instead of longer waiting time via solo mining). (1) E.g. crunch a BOINC project P with the pool for 1 day and check out how much magnitude, RAC you get. Then you can compare these values with solo-mining users from P, to see how you would fare as solo miner.
• You get a first feeling for this whole (the project and its software)

Disadvantages of pools

• Monetary aspects: fee + free credit. Pools want money for their service, e.g. pool1 takes currently 5% fee, and pool2: 20% (2). Considering that the payout time may be 1 week or more until you get your earned money E, you are basically also giving the pool a free credit, so they can use your money E for something else, and they will profit also from that. Imagine, when you could stake with all the Es from all pool participants, how much your ROI would be.

• You don't get project rain: Donation money is distributed to contributors based on the amount of work they do, e.g. during a team challenge a donator says: 'The users who finish BOINC WUs for project P, get in total X GRC'. And the X is divided according who does more WUs. Donated money can be up to 5000 GRC or more. Best is to ask the pool operator if they divide the project rain also to the pool participants.

• As a solo miner, you can contribute to all BOINC projects, the current pools do not offer all of them.

• Your BOINC work is attributed to the pool, not under your name

• You can't vote in Gridcoin polls. This is an important subject, since the pool owner can decide/overrun - like a whale - on important topics with all the hardware power you give them.

Summary, for me:

• For me, it's important to contribute work under my name. Remember, when you started this whole "BOINC-thing" what your ideals were. If you are just after money, there are better projects with more ROI out there.
• I have not the best hardware (machines, GPUs, ...), but considering that I lose money when using a pool (fees; giving free credit; I can not mine blocks with the pool payout immediately) I decided for solo mining.
• Of course you can do pool and solo mining at same time. But then I'd suggest you run them in separate BOINC clients to avoid possible conflicts

Questions people are asking about pools and Gridcoin

• When you are using the pool, your Gridcoin wallet shows a "CPID: INVESTOR": since you get only GRC paid out from the pool to your GRC address, this is correct. The "BOINC side" isn't associated with your wallet (e.g. the BOINC work units you process, ...), thus your magnitude, DPOR weight and so on will stay just as zero value. All the BOINC work you do is associated with the pool owner's wallet, and there the magnitude, ... etc is shown correctly.

notes

(1) Currently, it can take 2-4 days until you get your first payment via solo mining. Which way is faster, depends of course how fast the pool pays you out; your magnitude, balance, ...
(2) pool1: http://pool.gridcoin.co ; pool2: http://www.suchflex.com