Thanks for pointing that out... now if only they had pools for ZEN and ZCL.


Yeah, I knew that my average payout would effectively be reduced by 9% (1 block out of 11) but I chose them because - up until very recently, anyway - they had the shortest time to find a new block and my experience thus far, particularly with PPLNS pools, is that if there is too long between blocks you get royally screwed on your earnings. The most egregious example of this is VTC on give-me-coins where the time to find a block varies from 30 hours to over 100; you can literally mine there for days with no increase to your balance, leave the pool for something more productive and then it finds a block, say, 20 hours later and you still get nothing because the PPLNS window has closed.

So I figured an almost guaranteed loss of 9% was better than, say, randomly getting nailed for a 100% loss.

Someone took the time to explain what I was missing - that luck varies on a per-share basis, not just on a per-block basis. I still find it hard to believe that luck on a per-share basis could cause one miner to make 30% less than another over a 24 hour period when the pool finds a block every 2-4 minutes, but I can see it is at least possible.

Also, I tried running ccminer-klaust with a fixed difficulty of 512 in preparation for a retest and surprise-surprise, I only made 63% of the expected number of coins based on average difficulty... So that kind of cinched it for me right there.

I'm going to restest the two miners concurrently using the TZC pool on altminer.net as it doesn't require registration, an issue which has prevented me from registering a second payment miner/payment address on the TZC official pool.

Actually, you did not specify pool or share luck in your previous message, but I understand your point now and it makes sense. I still believe that my methodology would be okay *if* I had a large enough number of shares for each miner, even if they were variable diff, but...


I look at payout because I don't know how to get average hashrate from a pool except by looking at the SMA line on the graph, and that doesn't strike me as terribly accurate.


I don't currently have the expertise to set up a test network/private chain... 

I did a concurrently run comparison between MPH and NiceHash for 1 week which ended a few days ago and MPH lost, earning 10% less than NH; that's not exactly a good showing, given that NH more or less sucks.

MPH's website is a confusing mess, as well. For example, they don't list the coins available for each algorithm like on most Yiimp-based auto-switch, multip-algo pools. Manually checking those coins I know use Equihash it looks like the only one that finds blocks frequently enough for a 24 hour test to be valid is Zclassic. I also don't have a wallet set up for Zclassic yet, but I've been meaning to do that so this isn't a real obstacle.

I don't want to use auto-convert to BTC mode, however, as I noticed my BTC balance actually going down while coins were still waiting to be auto-exchanged.

Thanks for the constructive criticism @cryptoyes and @sir_blacks. There's only 4.5 hours to go on the current test so I might as well let it run but I will start a new comparison on Flypool. Still with just 1 GTX 1080 for each miner, unless one of you is willing to sell me 2 more 1080's at MSRP or less  

EDIT - so, looks like Flypool only has ZEC for Equihash, which isn't my preferred coin to mine. Anyone have a suggestion for a high volume ZEN pool?

Hmm... I'll give Flypool a shot, but I'm afraid I can't do anything about only dedicated 1 GTX 1080 to each miner for these tests right now - or for the immediate future - as GPUs simply aren't available unless you want to pay fuck-you prices.

I have to concede your point about pool luck, though. Luckpool was finding a block every few minute, but that information seems to be out-of-date because I just checked the blocks tab and it looks like the average TTF is now 1.1 hours, so 24 hours with a single card is, indeed, way too short of a time period.

BUT... if the TTF is less than 5 minutes then a 24 hour test based on payout should be just as accurate as counting up the number of fixed diff shares (fixed diff does not appear to be an option on Luckpool, however), even with a single GTX 1080.

Despite you taking away 40% of my earnings over the last week due to your forking issues, my balance has been stable and fully cleared at just above 0.001 BTC for at least 2 days but no payment has been made. Please check my BTC address: 1NSMAbm12rLDmbcVVVwj2TubejihokaTRf

Well, you obviously missed the current situation: everything cratering. I have bought some coins outright, but I mainly mine them for the simple reason that if any one coins goes down the shitter I've really only lost the electricity cost because my equipment can mine something else. If I bought the same coin outright - let's say I got suckered into Bitconnect, for a pertinent example - then I lose my investment capital and can't do a damn thing about it.

I'm not saying you should only mine coins, rather, that you shouldn't put all your investment eggs into one basket - pretty much the same advice as applied to stocks, bonds, etc.

No log file was created by bminer, and besides, it didn't crash in the usual way that word is defined. Bminer appeared to be running normally but the pool said it was offline. I stopped and restarted bminer, refreshed the pool page, and it was immediately registered as online again. The only possible connection I can think of is this occurred right after I switched computers the miners were running on - bminer was running on computer A and dstm was running on computer B, then at the 12 hour mark I shut down both miners and started them back up on the other computer (mining to the same address).

UPDATE - so far after 7 hours bminer has earned 0.0223 ZEN while dstm has earned 0.0210 ZEN.

The results of the dstm vs. bminer showdown have been postponed for 3+ hours because the luckpool website (not the pool) has been down ever since I woke up around 5:30 AM. I did stop both miners at 6:00AM and both were still mining at that time without issue (though, see my posts above). I'll update this post when luckpool's website comes back online.

UPDATE - luckpool's website is back up and I checked the balances of both miners: 0.0613 ZEN for dstm and 0.0584 for bminer. So bminer got trounced by nearly 5%, but some of that might be due it mysteriously crashing without appearing to have crashed for around 1 hour yesterday evening (which I fortunately caught).

In the interest of fairness and to be extra thorough I decided to do a second round of testing with the same methodology as before: each miner runs on a separate desktop with a single GTX 1080 mining to the same pool but with different payment addresses. I've tweaked the MSI AB profile for both cards so that each miner gives the same hashrate regardless of which card it runs on.

I'm very easy to convince if your argument has substance and is based in fact, but so far the only arguments I've seen are merely statements that I am wrong or, even less persuasive, that I am an idiot. Since I've designed entire drive systems for locomotives for my day job I'm unlikely to be convinced I'm an idiot just because some random dude on the internet says so.

Again, I am more than happy to change my testing methodology if a reasonable explanation can be given as to how it could be so flawed it would result in a 30% difference in coins earned on two consecutive days based on reported hashrate and average difficulty on minethecoin.com (not a snapshot of earnings from whattomine.com).

That said, the official Trezarcoin pool does allow mining with a fixed difficulty but adding a second account from the same IP address appears to be blocked by default - I've already sent an email to the support address saying I want to add a second account so I can test miners concurrently but no response so far. Thus I can at least try jugger1028's suggestion to count the number of shares earned with a fixed difficulty for x period of time with hsrminer, then compare that by mining with ccminer for the same period of time/same difficulty; the length of time wasn't specified, but based on the average time to find a block on pool.trezarcoin.com it seems that 12 hours per miner should be sufficient.

So, if that is acceptable I will proceed with the test, and if the results contradict my earlier findings I will edit my previous posts to warn that I got different results with a different test methodology because I don't have a particular axe to grind here.

The good news - at least in my experience over the last couple of months - is that they are a reliable/trustworthy pool for ZEN, it's just their website that has lots of problems.

Reviving this topic because the luckpool website is down once again - for the second time in 24 hours, actually - and has been for over an hour, at least. This is not an isolated incident for this pool, either - I've been mining there nearly continuously for a couple months now and the website breaks at least once a week.

Otherwise the pool seems to work fine and it has a lot of hashrate on ZEN so blocks are found frequently. Just wish they'd get the webserver issues ironed out.

http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/luckpool.org.html

What failure log? As far as bminer was concerned it was working just fine. It was claiming to get shares accepted and scrolling back up the console window didn't reveal any issues with the network connection. Besides, I was still able to use the web on both mining rigs the entire time the miner was running so that rules out a connection issue. Very peculiar, really.

The problem with your question is that you interrupted an ongoing discussion on a completely different topic to ask us to do your homework, so to speak. Use whattomine.com and figure out the answer for yourself.

The strategy I've decided makes the most sense if you have more than 1 rig - but aren't exactly running a farm - is to devote the bulk of your hashpower to a multi-algo/mult-coin auto-exchange pool, preferably something besides NiceHash (though the alternatives are not exactly controversy-free, either), and the rest to more speculative coins that you can hodl until they moon and then get your Lambo. 

Yeah, those aren't mutually exclusive... 

Is English not your first language or are you a moron?

Just passed the halfway point in my concurrent comparison of bminer 5.3.0 vs. dstm 0.5.8 and to make extra sure things are as fair as possible I flipped miners and rigs - bminer was on Rig 1 mining to Address 1, now it is on Rig 2 but still mining to Address 1, and vice versa for dstm.

The tally so far at the midpoint is 0.0327 ZEN for bminer and 0.0333 ZEN for dstm; less than a 2% difference, but with the advantage going to dstm now.

Testing will end tomorrow at 6:00AM EST and I will let immature shares settle for at least 1 hour before reporting results; luckpool finds blocks very often and provides an accurate tally of what you will earn for your shares, it just takes a while to move them from the immature column to confirmed, same as any other pool.

UPDATE - I just checked on the rigs and both miners were reporting they were hashing away just fine but the pool said bminer was offline. After restarting bminer the pool shows it back online again but there is a steep dip and rebound in the hashrate graph; earnings were affected as well, with dstm now at 0.0374 ZEN and bminer 0.0356 ZEN, so this wasn't a pool issue. I can't think of a worse failure mode for a miner, really - it was still drawing a huge amount of power and appearing to work, but not actually doing anything useful.

I have to admit I was just about to post something very similar to your rant after seeing about 35% of my last 5 days of mining get vaporized, but papacheal made a compelling case to not go on the warpath...

That said, I gave Zergpool a try because pinpins promoted it in the Trezarcoin thread and I liked that it is one of the few auto-exchange pools that has this coin (which I mine every now and then already). So I feel a bit more justified in feeling that your original point still holds - Zergpool may be new, but just like I had to learn the hard way about hard forks and mistyping wallet addresses and rigs crashing right after I went to bed, etc., pinpins needs to learn about software/coding that can block a port on his pool when a coin forks or otherwise orphans.

And like my mom always drilled into me as a kid, you only get one chance to make a first impression.