Is that the same bucket that NH charges 2% to transfer to their internal wallet where it can wait to get stolen by hackers? Asking for a friend...

Yeah, you keep talking about getting the *current* difficulty from whattomine while I keep saying I am using the *average difficulty for 24h* from minethecoin; very different, those two.

Now, there is one potential problem with using the average difficulty from minethecoin and applying it to the pool: minethecoin is likely performing a moving average for all of the blocks found by all of the pools for the past 24 hours, whereas any given pool will only find a fraction of the total blocks found in a 24 hour period. But I anticipated this issue and it is one of the reasons why I chose the official Trezarcoin pool to do my test and ran the test for 24 hours - again, that allows me to use the average difficulty value from minethecoin and it helps reduce the effects of wild variations in pool luck and/or of the difficulty of the blocks the pool does find.

I already agreed that running the test concurrently with identical hardware on the same pool, just different wallet addresses, would be a better test, but I don't think that automatically means my methodology is worthless.

Who cares if each block has a different difficulty or you can't know what the difficulty for a block will be before it is solved? You will certainly know the difficulty of a block after it is solved and as long as the pool finds blocks at a sufficiently rapid rate you can simply add up the difficulties for each block as they are found by the pool then divide by the number of blocks found - simple as that. I *assume* this is how minethecoin.com determines the average difficulty over the past 24 hours, but I admit I don't know for sure.

But if people here won't be satisfied unless I run the miners concurrently on the same pool, well, I'll see what I can do. It does not look like the official TZC pool will let me do that easily - you have to register with an email address, username, password, etc. - but a single-algo, multi-coin pool like hashrefinery or zergpool could work (although now we're adding the complication of not mining the exact same coins for the same times).

The preliminary assessment is unavailable because the luckpool.org web page won't refresh... I've been mining ZEN on there for a couple of months and this happens quite a bit with them, unfortunately. They do have a fairly large pool and high total hashrate, and have proven to be fair and reliable (at least the pool, if not the website).


UPDATE - okay, the luckpool website is back up (mining was unaffected) and so far, at 5 hours in, bminer is in the lead with 0.0103 ZEN vs. dstm with 0.0094 ZEN.

UPDATE 2 - It's now more or less a statistical tie at the 8h mark with 0.0227 ZEN for bminer and 0.0225 ZEN for dstm. Also, bminer has been consistently claiming a hashrate of 550-555 Sols/s while dstm's hashrate has been bouncing around between 520-535 Sols/s.

Sounds good - the more comparisons the better.

I only have a single RX 570 mining neoscrypt on Zergpool (single algo, multiple coin, auto-convert to BTC) just to try it out - nothing formal or scientific about my testing here - but let's just say it is earning more per day doing that than it would any of the single coins I normally mine with it. Similar situation with hashrefinery in multi-neoscrypt-coin to BTC mode.

Others here suggested I try ahashpool but I passed on it (as well as Zpool) because of the high minimum payout, and now that I've read about the problems people have been having the last few days I'm even more happy with my decision.

Yes, that would be the next approach I would use. I was already running a comparison on my two separate GTX 1080 systems which is why I did a consecutive 24 hour test of hsrminer vs. ccminer. Currently those two systems are doing a head-to-head comparison of dstm vs. bminer mining ZEN on luckpool.org and I was next going to do a comparison between zergpool and hashrefinery because preliminary testing of both has proved very promising.

Translation: "I don't mean to be insulting but I'll insult you anyway..."

I did not base my evaluation strictly on the # of coins mined, I based it on that vs. the average difficulty for 24h as reported by minethecoin.com, and then I recursively iterated the hashrate required to get to the actual number of coins.

If there is a flaw in my methodology please take the time to enlighten me rather than merely call me silly and my post worthless.

EDIT - and yes I realize that running the miners concurrently on separate, identical rigs mining to the different wallet addresses on the same pool is the ideal methodology, and maybe I will do that next, but at this point I am not seeing any reason to spend more time on the evaluation given the response so far.

Hmm... the pool I was using for the Neoscrypt miner test finds a block every 2-4 minutes on average so that shouldn't result in more than about +/- 0.5% difference in earned coins over a 24 hour period. I could redo the test mining in parallel with a single GTX 1080 for each - as I am doing right now comparing dstm to bminer - but I seriously doubt that will erase the 20 percentage point difference I got between ccminer and hsrminer.

I should also note that what inspired me to do this test was that I switched my one real mining rig (6x GTX 1060) over from ZEN to TZC for a few hours because ZEN difficulty was straight up nuts (basically tripled) and I wanted a few more TZC for staking. Since hsrminer appeared to be faster that is what I used and I let it run for nearly 5 hours. After that time frame - while keeping an eye on the current difficulty on minethecoin.com - I found I had only earned about 75% of what I should have, so I decided to run ccminer klaust for 24 hours on the same pool then run hsrminer again, except this time for 24 hours; first hsrminer run (~5h) gave me 75% of expected earnings while second run (24h) gave me 70% of expected earnings. Klaust, sandwiched in between the two hsrminer runs, gave me 90% of expected earnings.

Yes, I ran two rigs at the same time for the MPH vs. NH test. Each was a single GTX 1080.

The miner software test was run consecutively, but I normalized earnings by using the average difficulty for each 24 hour period for each miner so they were evaluated based on the coins earned vs. their reported hashrate vs. the average difficulty for their 24 hour period.

I just started a head-to-head comparison of dstm 0.5.8 and bminer 5.3.0 mining ZEN to separate wallet addresses on luckpool.org with each getting a GTX 1080 that were tuned to have matching hashrate on either miner (ie - the hashrate reported by bminer was the same on each card, not that the hashrates for bminer and dstm were the same).

Test started at 6:00AM my time and will run for 24 hours so I can use the average difficulty on minethecoin to evaluate how accurately each miner reports its hashrate and, of course, to see which one comes out on top.

I should note, however, that I had some issues with bminer locking up my computer so hard I had to hit the reset button when I tried to exit it while I was setting up the test; not a promising start, really, but it seems to run okay if left alone.

While comparing Nemosminer/MiningPoolHub vs. NiceHash I was also doing a Neoscrypt miner comparison between hsrminer and ccminer KlausT (8.19) and I think I may have found one, if not the, reason why Nemosminer/MPH lost to NH: hsrminer lies like a rug about its hashrate.

I tested the two miners by doing consecutive 24 hour runs with a 6x GTX 1060 rig on the official Trezarcoin pool because it is one that I trust and it finds a block every 4 minutes or less on average, minimizing the effect pool luck might have on the results.

After 24 hours I stopped the miner-under-test and looked at the average difficulty reported by minethecoin.com for the past 24 hours and then iterated the hashrate until the number of coins on minethecoin matched what I actually earned. If there are errors in minethecoin's calculations, then they would likely affect both miners equally.

The results were not pretty. For hsrminer, anyway.

ccminer klaust reported an average hashrate of 4.1 MH/s and should have earned 123 coins; actual earnings were 111. Effective hashrate was 3.7 MH/s.

hsrminer reported an average hashrate of 4.3 MH/s and should have earned 126 coins, but actual earnings were 92!?! Effective hashrate was 3 MH/s!

In other words, hsrminer was 30% slower than it claimed, and nearly 20% slower than ccminer klaust. Needless to say, this radically changes the profitability matrix generated by Nemosminer's benchmarking script and so I would like to redo the Nemosminer/MPH vs. NH comparison except this time with ccminer klaust (or one of the existing ccminer forks, at least) for the Neoscrypt miner.

EDIT - I am not changing any of the above, but notifying any who come across this that I did another test of ccminer and hsrminer, except run concurrently mining to different addresses on the same pool, and this time hsrminer was 11% faster (though claiming to be 22% faster).

Sorry, I meant to write that the site I used for average difficulty was minethecoin.com, not whattomine.com. I just concluded a full 24 hour test of hsrminer after doing a 24 hour test of ccminer which was preceded by a ~5 hour test of hsrminer, etc., and the results are not pretty; see post above this one.

EDIT - actually, I did refer to minethecoin and not whattomine in the post you referenced, so whatchootalkinboutwillis?

The results are in from my retest of hsminer over a full 24 hour period and its performance was even worse than before: it only earned 91.8 TZC instead of the 130.6 predicted based on its claimed hashrate of 4.3 MH/s and an average difficulty for 24 hours of 66, as reported by minethecoin.com. In other words, hsrminer earned 30% fewer coins because its effective hashrate was closer to 3 MH/s, instead of the 4.3 MH/s it was touting the entire time.

So not only is hsrminer not any faster than the KlausT fork of ccminer, it is actually significantly slower...

The rig used consists of (6) GTX 1060 3GB cards and the pool is the official one for Trezarcoin, pool.trezarcoin.com, and which finds a block every 4 minutes or less on average so a 24 hour test should keep error due to variation in luck below 1%. A 24 hour test also allows the use of the average difficulty reported by minethecoin.com which keeps error due to swings in difficulty to a minimum.

I am definitely curious to see if anyone else can corroborate or refute my results, especially with a different coin and/or pool, but please make sure to follow the same methodology I used so we are all comparing apples to apples here.

EDIT - I am not changing any of the above, but notifying any who come across this that I did another test of ccminer and hsrminer, except run concurrently mining to different addresses on the same pool, and this time hsrminer was 11% faster (though claiming to be 22% faster).

FWIW, I am informally testing both ZergPool and HashRefinery on "mine any Neoscrypt coin, convert to BTC" mode and both are doing quite well. I will likely do a formal comparison of them next week, but I can already tell you that I have earned significantly more on ZergPool than I would have mining a single coin like TZC for the same time period. Their servers are in Latvia so the ping time is a bit long for me here in the US - about 150ms - but I am averaging about 0.1% rejected shares despite that.

Testing did stop about 3 hours ago and the total balance at NiceHash is 0.00207672 BTC, with 0.00126187 BTC sitting on their wallet, ready to send to me, and another 0.00081485 BTC tied up on my miner - I really don't get how that even happens but, whatever... I just have to run NH a little longer to get that balance up to 0.001 so it transfers to my (what? NH wallet?).

Meanwhile, MiningPoolHub is sitting at 0.00180649 BTC but there are still balances in several coins that are in the process of getting converted to BTC and who knows how long that will take to complete. Given that it has already been 3 hours I doubt they are going to get processed and confirmed anytime soon so maybe tomorrow morning I'll have the final tally for MPH. That said, it doesn't look like the balance will increase all that much so as of now MPH got trounced by NH.

EDIT - forgot to specify where the balance from NH miner goes... probably because I don't know why it has to go in the first place.  

UPDATE - Balance on MPH has climbed to 0.00187639 BTC over the last few hours and there is still one coin that needs to be exchanged.

Update 2 - Final balance on MPH came to 0.00188193 BTC, or 10.4% less than NH for 1 week of mining with a single GTX 1080.

Use the individual coin calculators on minethecoin.com and check "average 24 hour" under "Dificulty" [sic]. That will give you a more accurate estimate of how much you should have made over the past 24 hours with a specified hashrate.

Whattomine can give the same information, but its a bit harder to interpret.

Also, try to use more descriptive thread titles; I usually don't click on threads with meaningless or vague titles like "Help!" or "Please explain this" or the like.

Testing will end at 3:30pm today (about 5 hours from now) for 1 week of total run time. I will then need to let MPH settle all of the coin exchanges to get the final tally and I'm not sure how long that will take; probably a few hours at least.

The way I understand it, NH charges 2% fee to transfer to/from their internal wallet - I'm not really sure when that comes into play as this is my first time using NH, but I am outraged nonetheless that I have to pay any fee to transfer money between internal wallets. However, there is no fee to transfer BTC from NH to Coinbase, so that is where I will be sending my NH earnings.

Conversely, there will be a fee to transfer BTC from MPH to an external wallet - e.g., Coinbase, Bittrex, Cryptopia... even that train wreck, stocks.exchange - so I will send that balance to my Bittrex account, as it is actually useful for trading. I will then have to wait some unknown number of hours for both transfers to clear so I'm guessing I'll be posting my new comparison thread tomorrow.

I will list the algos I enabled in NH and MPH since I did not let either program use all that were available. I have no idea whether all of the algos I did enable were used by either miner and, frankly, I don't much care; the whole point of auto-switching miners is to do that work for you, so if I have to micromanage what algos are used and when then I might as well mine single coins (which, btw, is what I primarily do  ).

I can't promise you I'll remember to PM you when I post the new thread but I'll try. I also have some other comparisons running at the moment so I'll be pretty busy today and tomorrow writing everything up.

My understanding - which has been borne out by testing on 2 different machines - is that the only memory that matters with CPU mining Cryptonight is the L3 cache; the faster it is, and the more of it, the faster Cryptonight can be mined.

FYI, the ideal number of threads for mining Cryptonight is L3 size in MB / 2. For example, the Ryzen 5 1600 has a 16MB L3 cache so the ideal number of threads is 8.

Also, avoid the use of Core 0 / Thread 0 if you run Windows 10 and need to use the computer for other things.

I highly recommend XMR-Stak in CPU-only mode and posted below is the relevant part of my cpu.txt file that sets up the thread configuration for my Ryzen 5 1600 and which gets around 440 H/s on average with minimal impact to usability:


This configuration was figured out with the help of PM conversations between me and fellow user @Set Ready Go.

This is the conventional wisdom, yes, and I don't necessarily disagree with it, but in my experience so far (admittedly not much), the longer the average time to find a block on a pool the lower the payout I receive, regardless of how long I mine at the pool. Theoretically there should be times when I get much more than the average payout balancing out the times I get much less on these smaller pools, but it seems that only the much lower payouts occur for me.

The most extreme example for me so far has been mining VTC on the give-me-coins pool which finds a block every 30+ hours or so; from a statistics standpoint I would need to mine there for nearly a year for my earnings to average out, and in the immortal words of Sweet Brown, "ain't nobody got time fo dat."

I don't think this test is trustworthy, not to say completely useless. Poolside average hashrate - such as can be determined from the pool I was using, as it does not provide a simple moving average graph - was roughly the same as what hsrminer reported, but the actual amount of TZC that I earned was substantially less than predicted by minethecoin.com using hsrminer's reported hashrate and the average difficulty for the last 24 hours. I am retesting hsrminer on the same pool now - results available in about 12 hours - but so far at just a little over the halfway mark I have earned 44.5 TZC vs. a predicted earnings of 63.5, or about 30% less, which is even worse than my previous test of hsrminer (24% less than predicted).

EDIT - I should note that this is on the official TZC pool which finds a block every 4 minutes on average.