Bitcoin Forum

I have cheap electricity and a few Antminer S1's set up, so that's going well. However... My Scrypt mining setup is far more modest. I've only got a few MH at the moment, so I certainly want to maximize my profits, if even a little. I've been mining on Hashfaster, and it's been going well. However, I'm wondering if a multipool would increase my profits, if even a little. I've searched google for this, but I can't seem to get a straight answer on this.

All in all, what would the profit increase be, if I went to a multipool? Is it even worth bothering, or shall I just stay at Hashfaster? What do you guys think?

A lot of times it is more profitable as they track the best coins to mine and sell them.

http://poolpicker.eu/

this. but it also have a negative impact on the price of the mined coins because of dumping. not that anyone except the holders of the said alt-coin cares, of course.

if you are short sighted, multipool are for you... but since they kill the coins in the process, you don't get much... (or for not really long...)
so whatever profit you are making it doesn't last.

In a way though, isn't it good for the big coins? You've got a bunch of two-bit coins with nothing big to offer, and they're dumped for profit, hopefully reinforcing the value of the big coins that survive? I mean, have legitimately good and innovative coins been killed by multipool mining?

Then again, now I see a point in scam coins. Have a massive hashing power set up, launch the coin, mine a huge amount of it, pump until it has even a tiny amount of value, then dump the hell out of it. Is that how it works with a lot of these scam coins? I guess it'd make sense. But that certainly hurts cryptos in general. Hard to know what coins to trust, and which are garbage. :P

I think Multi-Pools are great if you don't have time to watch trends and research coins - but I have found they pay far less then if I were to pick the coins I mine, when I mine them and when I sell them.

Sometimes you want to mine a coin and then sit on it for a little while.  The multi-pools have pressure to sell quickly - and that is not always a good thing to do.

But yeah - the bad thing is Multi-Pools can clobber a coin -- so you have to be one step ahead of them :)

Multipools do have their pitfalls if they don't auto convert/exchange the coins mined into BTC on the fly.

I would advise not using a multipool that simply banks the coins - or transfers the coins mined via API (say to Cryptsy)/auto payout to addresses - as you will likely end up with a lot of worthless cryptos.

Also, multipools are VERY easy to manipulate in terms of what coins they mine - specifically on the alternate algos like X11, X13, NIST, X15, etc. For example:

- If a coin is trading on Cryptsy at 0.00000015 - and is thinly traded with very low volume, a person can easilly sell off coins in order to make the pool think the coin is "less profitable" or vice versa - if the person wants to draw attention away from another coin in order to lower difficulty on the coin he/she wants to mine - he can push up the price of the 0.00000015 to say 0.0000017 - which is a large difference percentage wise. The pool then thinks the 0.00000017 is the "best coin to mine" - and switches over to that.

In reality a lot of times the profitability difference from COIN A to COIN B is only 1 or 2% points. So a coin trading under 100 Satoshis can be made to look more profitable, or less profitable, simply by using a bot to auto buy or sell small amounts at one satoshi up or one satoshi down - thus either driving multipool hashpower towards or away from a coin.

I tried this just to experiment and it does work - I experimented a long while back on BLUECOIN (I never did it long term or for the point of making any real money); rather just to see if it actually worked - and it does. I simply used a bot to place a sell order of 1000 BLU at the Buy Price, which was enough (I think it was trading at 0.00000009) to drive all multipool hashpower away from the coin. By simply selling just a few coins at 0.00000008 it dropped the price 12% thus making it a poor performer in the eyes of the multipool systems.

Again, just to reiterate, I did this simply to test my theory; and it proved to me to not use multipools - and stick with the coins I  "wanted" to mine.

That said - be careful what coins you chose to mine, what pool you use, and my advice is convert the coins as fast as possible to BTC.

CD

Good point -- yes -- I have seen multi-pools manipulated easily as well.  And I was curious -- so I did a very quick test to see how easily it could be done.

I noticed a particular coin was showing an unusually high profitability on a particular multi-pool (like 340% over LTC) - so the pool switched to it and started mining. 

I then looked at the exchange the data came from and found that someone put a buy order for 75 of these coins at a very high price.  So the pool pulled that last buy price and used it to create the profitability statistic.

I then bought 100 coins or so -- at the crazy high price and then down to the next buy which was really low (what it was normally trading for).  Then the pool dropped to like 13% profitability over LTC and it switched to another coin.  It was so easy. 

After seeing that - I decided to stay off the Multi-Pools.

Pool operators really need to work on better statistics when determining the profitability of mining a particular coin.  Just pulling from Coinwarz or from the last sold price / next buy price can give you really bad information.  It should look at more details -- like the current buy price and quantity at that price -- in addition to some volume averages, etc.

And then I think some multi-pools are not truthful -- and there may be some "back room deals" going on to move hash to or away a particular coin.  You never know what is really going on.

Thanks for sharing this. Interesting, didn't know it works so easy to manipulate a multipool. Are you mining LTC now or other altcoins on a dedicated pool?

I mine just a few alt coins at a time typically -- but I manually switch to them when I'm ready. 

I typically look at the current difficulty - where it is going - the current price and where it will go. 

And then you need to look at other major coins (and what they are doing) -- as many people will switch to the "most profitable coin" at the moment -- which leaves a lot of opportunities with other coins that are being neglected :)

Do you mine on pools or do you install wallets and mine directly?

Make no mistake in thinking that the major pool owners, the exchange owners, and the shadows in the dark turning out new coins aren't all poker buddies.

They work together no doubt about it.

CD

It is very difficult to predict the price and difficulty.

not really, i find it to better mine the coin by yourself, for autosellf your coin they ask for and additional fee, i tried with trademybit

But there are trends and signs.  If a coin all of a sudden gets a huge hash behind it -- for no real reason on the surface, then you know something is up and more investigating is needed.