I just saw Mincoin showing a potential 600%+ profit relative to LTC on Coinwarz (around 10PM PST), which is pretty amazing. Not surprisingly, Hashcows was mining MNC at that time. But just a few minutes later, MNC was at 77% profits vs. LTC, so in the course of 10 minutes or less, MNC spiked to a huge value and then plummeted to a lousy value. The result of this is that Hashcows spent 10 minutes on MNC, mining 36 MNC that at current exchange rates are worth 0.02382912 BTC. If they were to mine at that rate 24/7, all 1700MHash of power at Hashcows would generate 3.43139328 BTC in a day, or around 0.002 BTC per MHash, which is obviously far less than what you would get from just mining LTC (currently around 0.007 BTC/MHash).
Now if this was the exception rather than the rule, that would be fine, but for the past few days that doesn't appear to be the case. Hashco.ws mined WDC for 126 minutes earlier today, generating 1283.0131392 WDC during that time. If we mined 24/7 on WDC, that would work out to 14663 WDC per day. At the current exchange rate (0.00043139) they could trade for at best 6.325 BTC. That means around 0.0037 BTC per MHash. But Coinwarz is showing 125% profitability vs. LTC right now. Maybe we just had an unlucky spell?
Let's try another.... Round 6565 at Hashco.ws was Ron Paul Coin (RPC), for 3 hours 55 minutes (3.917 hours), during which time the pool mined 59.0672 RPC. At the current exchange rate of 0.0191 BTC per RPC (and the best we've seen in the past 24 hours is only 0.02655 BTC per RPC), we're looking at 361.9437 RPC per day, which would be worth 6.91 BTC (or best-case 9.61 BTC), so again we're well below the 100% mark of LTC mining. Remember, LTC mining on its own with 1700MHash out to generate 436 LTC per day, which at 0.029 BTC each is 12.35 BTC per day.
But all of the alt-coins are going soft, right? Well, not quite....
What about DOGE? I know it was created as a joke coin, but I haven't seen a round of DOGE lately on Hashco.ws, which is odd. With 0.00000045 BTC per DOGE, based on the Coinwarz calculator Hashco.ws should be able to get around 18.171 BTC per day with 1700MHash, so there's at least one alt-coin that's beating the odds. Hell, even at the worst trade value of 0.00000025 BTC per DOGE (from Jan 8-9 time), we'd be looking at 10.095 BTC per day, which is still better than any of the other alt-coins I've run the calculations on above.
This is a long-winded way of saying something has perhaps gone fubar with the Hashco.ws (and Middlecoin and probably others as well) algorithm for selection of coins. Maybe it's that difficulty plummets, making the coin(s) look attractive, but by the time 1700MHash enters the picture the difficulty jumps back up and profitability drops back to nothing. Whatever is happening, all I can say is that right now profitability for mining via the multi-coin pools is not working out to what it should be. And what it should be is more profitable than mining LTC directly -- that's the whole point.
If you're still trying to mine at Hashco.ws or Middlecoin, I know personally the returns have been very poor for the past week -- like less than half of what you should get relative to mining LTC. Just going static on mining one of the more stable alt-coins like DOGE, WDC, LOT, EAC, etc. is supposed to be beating LTC by at least 20% over the past 14 days, and every time the multi-coin pools switch it seems to result in lower profits for miners. For now, I'm going to try manually mining one or two of the "best" alt-coins for a day and see what sort of returns I can get via Cryptsy's automatic trading. I'll report back and see how I do compared to Hashco.ws (where I've left ~1MHash of mining power).
Thanks for this priceless research. That sums my findings too, its great to see that I am not the only one here with these returns, and thoughts. Thanks Jarred
ReplyDeleteI had considered mining coins manually by checking each day, but i want a balance where i don't need to monitor everything so closely and sacrifice a little profit for convenience.
ReplyDeleteI never expected the multipools were doing so badly though. With around 2.3-2.5MH i'm making 1 BTC every 5 weeks on Middlecoin. After reading this i might consider switching to pure LTC mining if it's better. I would go for DOGE or something, but i don't think i want to bother with so many wallets and a lot of manual switching, though the Cryptsy trading you mentioned sounds decent.
I can't speak for hashco.ws, but middlecoin is very transparent in its payouts. If you want to know what your Mh/s will get you, then just find an address with a similar Mh/s and do an average over 7 days. That should get you a pretty good idea of what people got the last week.
ReplyDeleteExample of ~1Mh/s: http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/1ESUsJa9yefqrZmthXdr2b5x6GfZVhomyu.html
(0.01881546 + 0.01344868 + 0.01150896 + 0.01654883 + 0.01781451 + 0.01077931 + 0.01825524) / 7 == 0.015310141428571
Example of ~3Mh/s: http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/17hWNk8CDEEMGkaNg3UNFkBvwR6ukeimSX.html
(0.02181129 + 0.02331935 + 0.03141748 + 0.03220237 + 0.05295752 + 0.03933653 + 0.03242147) / 7 == 0.033352287142857
Really bad maths.
DeleteFor the first example the last 7 paid outs are for 11 days.
The 2nd example is poorly choosed. He mined at 5mh/s for 4 days, then nothing, then a little.
Don't know how you know it's 3Mh/s
The math was fine, but the sources aren't. I just picked two random users from the user page, but clearly I didn't do my due diligence, my apologies.
Delete~1.5Mh/s with 7 concurrent days:
http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/1B5Q7ukNFPLST3cicNLG6HncPDQZPzJka5.html
(0.01587678 + 0.01572146 + 0.01178059 + 0.01148370 + 0.01870457 + 0.01373705 + 0.01208997) / 7 == 0.01419916
~4.0Mh/s with 7 concurrent days:
http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/159Qqu98UP4Z5tp5zUKVtUKE9aEtvsF3rG.html
(0.03900493 + 0.03831941 + 0.03008201 + 0.02847970 + 0.04639396 + 0.03716476 + 0.03063051) / 7 == 0.03572504
That gives around 0.009 per Mh/s over the last 7 days.
That sounds about right since i've ended up with around 0.03 per day with 2.4KH or so on my rig. Some days i get 0.04+, some days barely making 0.02.
DeleteI might investigate Cryptsy's auto BTC trading as mentioned in the article. Ideally i want to configure it so that i can mine a random altcoin (whatever the best for the day is), then convert daily to BTC. Then once i hit 0.1 BTC, send it to my offline wallet.
Actually, i take that back, i didn't look closely enough enough after the first week (been on Middlecoin for 3 weeks today). Turns out i'm actually making 0.025 per day! Will defintely take a look at other options then.
DeleteUsing Martin's two links (the second two), ~1.5MHash is getting on average 0.0142 BTC per day and ~4.0MHash is getting 0.0357 BTC per day. That means the 1.5MHash is getting 0.009466 BTC/MHash/day while the 4MHash is getting 0.008931 BTC/MHash/day. That's a bit odd as well -- 6% difference in results over the same period, though without having the 7-day MHash average for both I suppose we might be off on estimating the hash rates.
DeleteAnyway, for the same period, a decent LTC pool would be doing around 0.008 BTC/Mhash/day, so on those two examples at least Middlecoin is beating the average. If your hash rate isn't quite so steady, I'm not sure it works out as well.
I'm getting the same results with my 0.9MHash (R9 290x). I've been hopping from one pool to another for a few days, and it seems that mining DOGE directly is the most profitable way for now [up to 0.0085 BTC\MHash\d]. Maybe else Protoshares (non-scrypt coin, 1Gh.com made a single-pool OpenCL-miner) [0.008 BTC\MHash\d]. Hashcows\Middlecoin gives less [0.0065-0.0075 BTC\MHash\d].
ReplyDeleteMIddlecoin has been absolutely horrible on returns this week. I literally checked my rigs to make sure something wasn't wrong. Got too big for it's own good ;(
ReplyDeleteApparently Middlecoin had issues with the stats reporting for a couple days, and were not unresponsive on forums. This caused several, including myself, to jump to other pools. However the mining and payout operations continued as normal, and I have returned to mining there. Middlecoin could do itself a huge favor and be more communicative/transparent.
DeleteI think the real issue is that some of these networks tend to go off the most recent prices in CoinWarz/CoinChoose. Sometimes a big order can spike the price of an alt coin, causing it to look very profitable for a short period of time. If the pool sees that, it might mine it for a while based on the false assumption that it will continue to be profitable. This can easily be overcome by taking multiple snapshots of CoinWarz/CoinChoose and mining the coin that has been, on average, the most profitable over the last hour or two.
ReplyDeleteThis is what I'm getting at. If you're using data from an external site like Coinwarz to do your math for which coin to mine, there's a real chance for things to get messed up. The calculations should be fairly standard, but the need to get the appropriate number of confirmations, then transfer coins to an exchange (and wait for more confirmations), and only then can you sell... well, there are lots of places where such a workflow can go wrong.
DeleteMiddlecoin has been great recently getting about 0.015btc/mhs the past 4 or 5 days.
ReplyDeleteThat's odd, because it's been the worst for me for around the past 10 days. I vary around 2.3-2.6MH on my rig and i've been getting about half that.
Deletehttp://www.middlecoin.com/reports/17mBUNcGtmc7Vz8tXshvVRJwkUC62XQ6qG.html
Pretty poor. I'm going to try LTC @ WeMineLTC and see if i get any better results.
Interesting blog. Well, like it or not, multi-pools are the future. In a couple of months every single miner will mine in a multi-pool with auto-trade. People has better things to do rather then looking at the coin markets all the time. Hashcows and Middlecoin are pioneers in this field and thus is normal for them to have issues. They might be doing better if they would design their algorihms based on mathematical models for cryptocurrencies mining - but hey, there is no such thing out there for now. The fileld of cryptocurrency mining is a new field and current multi-pools are done in an try&fail manner instead of first look at the theory, build mathematical models for mining & tradeing - and then go to implementation. The proof of multi-pools being the future is the succes of Middlecoin (almost at 15Gh/s!!!) with even some huge single users (the biggest user at Middlecoin has almost 1 Gh/s on its own!!!). Another proof are "professional" pools at the horizon - like poolwarz.com. On the other hand it is obvoius that large multi-pools will bring the end to alt-coins ... enormous hash power is a killer for an alt-coin because it will die before it will be able to stand or walk. But hey - do we really want alt-coins? No! I would just like to see only BTC and a couple of other coins with decent profit - it would make life much easier for miners, traders and end users (it is like in real life - we have gold and then silver, diamants and a couple of other "valuable rocks"). BTW: my profits @8Mh/s with Middlecoin are 0.012BTC per Mh/s for the last 7 days.
ReplyDeleteWhat you a seeing is the difference in prices while mining the coin and when the coin is confirmed and hits the exchange. As multipools increase in popularity it has more and more become a race to get the coins to the exchange first before the price plummets due to the incoming dump. This is why some pools attempt to hide what coin they are mining at the moment and why all multipools should use their own algorithm to calculate the most profitable coin and not use which ever coinchoose/coinwarz says is top atm. The hashrates of these pools are at the point that it has become a battle of bots.
ReplyDeleteHi Jared....would love to hear about your findings regarding the pool vs. one coin methodology.... Great posts by the way... -Matt
ReplyDelete