Mining for pools where you are more than 1% can be rather difficult, and despite all the talk of decentralization it's actually provably less profitable to mine at a small pool than at a large pool. If it's not, then why doesn't everyone just stick with solo mining forever? Because you'll likely never find a single block that way, just like a small pool will only find blocks infrequently. A pool with 3% of the hash rate for example is likely to find about 2.7% of blocks in my experience, while a pool with 1% might only find 0.5% of the blocks. And a pool with 35% of the hash rate might find 37% of blocks. But that's a topic for discussion elsewhere.
I'm mining a decent amount of coins right now, which is of course generating tons of small payouts over time. What's the best way to consolidate those so I can do one or two larger transfers to an exchange? Do I just run:
transfer 0 [My Address] [Amount] [My Address]
And do that multiple times until I can send larger transactions of 10 to 100 coins without having the wallet balk about having too many inputs? I guess I'd have to wait for confirmation on the transfers as well, but better than than ending up with vaporized coins. LOL
Yes that will work. I send as much as will fit (approximately) in a single payment, and keep sending that payment again and again until there is little left. Then wait for it to return as consolidated inputs.
N.B. you only need to do:
transfer 0 [My Address] [Amount]
The repeated address in your command is payment id, but does no harm: transfer 0 [My Address] [Amount] [My Address=Payment Id]