on the "GPU will never die" thread...

...I get LTC diff going up and up, more gpus for sure, maybe racks of gridseeds coming online too. Either way I don't see it going down much anymore, and profitability is getting really squeezed..

...then the non-scrypt coins should be getting hash, and diff going up, price going up. long term value etc. But take VTC, it's tanking like everything else EXCEPT LTC and BTC.

My hunch is actually that it isn't the miners that drive the price of LTC and BTC anymore (note new chinese LTC exchange..) and the link to difficulty has largely been removed, because now people, non-miners, actually buy the stuff. It is remarkable how solid the BTC price has been through the recent catastophes and continual diff increases. LTC is seen as early BTC by outsiders now, and the diff hikes are due to asics. The two things are NOT linked..

My point is no-one actually cares how "good" coin is, ie algorithm, confirms etc, the market decides. The crapcoins will die (switching pools thankfully have maimed them) and we will be left with a few coins everybody has heard of and form the future.

So I think GPUs are dying for mining, mainly because things like VTC are just regarded as another crap coin, which is unfair to the coin from a mining point of view, and asics are here from scrypt and sha256.

So, let's take a step back...

If you add up the hash rate of middlecoin, wafflepool and clevermining, that's about 60 Gh/s give or take the odd 5. There's other coin switching pools with or without direct BTC conversion and I'm sure some of them are significant, but hey-ho, you get my drift.

On the other hand, we have litecoin and dogecoin which might be around the 200 Gh/s mark. *Crucially*, everything else feathercoin, worldcoin et. al are down at the 5Gh/s or so level.

So, here we all are. Moaning about the BTC/Mh/Day. Haven't we caused the problem. Collectively?

The profits are down because several of coin switching algorithms are all doing similar things (see poolpicker for FACTUAL evidence), the OPs can't create profit because the profit isn't there. The profit isn't there because (a) the pools are too big to hit the small coins and therefore (b) there's a requirement to convert whatever there is to BTC - and that requires someone to actually want piles of crapcoins nobody wants. Am I missing something here ?

I can imagine that people with 100's of BTC from the early days want to diversify, which drove things for a while.  but there has to be a limit doesn't there ??

It is noticeable that H20 has been carrying 200 BTC of uselessness for ages on middlecoin - so even his back door trades have dried up. We are lucky, we have an organised and transparent OP, but the guy can't create money out of nothing. If there is no demand not much we can do...

Or...Is it all down to thousands of gridseeds coming online ? The litecoin hashrate keeps going up and I can't believe it's all down to AMD selling loads of 290s..

So what do you think ? Is the current profitablity just a blip, or have the big coin switching pools simply forced us to accept what we all know. CrapCoins are crap

let's say each BTC address submitted shares with a risk score associated with it as noted a few posts above. You could throttle the risk score to the users hash rate in a manner that would match (a) the availability of the smaller coins and (b) the pool configuration, ie 5 servers running 5 switching algos with a different (but possibly overlapping) basket of coins). As you say (b) is done already.

The difference I'm suggesting is that the profit/risk factor is user selectable, rather than at present all the earnings got into the pot and are shared equally. It would be a way for the whales and minnows to live together happily, subject to the constraint of the availability of small coins to mine.

I have a conceptual question, following on from the observation that the profitability of any pool seems to be inversely proportional to its size..

First just want to say I have a huge amount of respect for PoolWaffle, I have no idea how to set up a pool, sort out the coin switching, keep track of the payments, ramp up the pool hash rate steadily and evenly to be I think the biggest switching pool on the planet now, keep on top of the support and be nice about it. Chapeau, as they say in cycling..

My question ...is there a "right size" for a coin switching pool ?

If you are small, you can hit very small profitable coins, run the risk of forks, orphans. A skilled operator has the potential to be extremely profitable. If you are very large then you can't hit the small coins instead go for a steady income on the larger ones. If you are too big then even if you try to hit the small coins as well, and you succeed, you won't actually make much difference to the overall profit per mh since the fraction you can devote to these is negligible in terms of the mh of the pool as a whole.

It seems pool size is a bit like an investment strategy. High risk of high return versus low risk of low return, and this is implicit in the pool total mh. To mitigate this perhaps PoolWaffle could make the risk selectable in terms of the mh submitted by a user, say a score of 1 to 10. This would make everybodys payment different, but would allow the risk profile of the pool to be set by the users. The whales need to be conservative because they consume enough electricity to power a small town, whereas the smaller hobby miners might like a flutter, some may not. Profitability versus mh risk score would be very interesting, and again mirror what goes on in the investment world.

There would be a limit on how much high risk mh there could be, but if we assume that people like sfire need to be conservative, it might actually work out..

(disclaimer - I'm not in the financial business !!!)

Can I follow up on this with a query to the experts ??

Am I correct in thinking that CleverMining on the BTC/Mh/Day measure uses the *accepted*, rather than the total submitted shares to give the specific profit number? If that is the case, then comparing this measure on something like poolpicker is going to artificially inflate the "profitability" of the this pool over others, since the reject rate is noticeably (but understandably) higher at CleverMining, we should really be comparing on a pure miner hash rate measure (assuming a given rig). Fundamentally, profit is how much BTC you get for how much hash you throw out for a given mining setup to a given pool. Rejects come from poor miner setup (nothing to do with the pool) and the coin being mined (nothing to do with the pool either). BUT rejects are still important if >few percent and if the reject level differs between pools then pool to pool comparisons on money/accepted is not the full picture.

I am running / have run on Middlecoin, HashCows, wafflePool in the past, and enough to worry about profitability. Want to try CleverMining once the eu server arrives (my ping is a bit to high (plus the reject issue) to make me leave bleed off some rigs from WafflePool at the mo)

WafflePool have a super low reject level, and a solid eu server, but they mine bigger coins, but the OP suggests changes to hit sub 20 diff coins, so hanging in there for now. CleverMining *seem* to have the really smart coinswitcher/trader and report a good BTC/Mh/day BUT is it really measurably better (10% say) than any other auto-trading pool for X Mh/s of hash resource

My gut feeling is there isn't that much in it at the end of the day (its all factored in etc..), and mostly we are just better off having worthy competitors to middlecoin and have operators that are technically smart people, put the hours in, stay in touch, and make mining a collaborative activity rather than a bitch-fest. Thank god for that.

Thoughts anybody ?

hi i have a query I can't find the answer to. One of my miners (on the eu server) keeps telling me

"accepted untracked stratum share from pool 0"

I'm using cgminer 3.7.2, and not using --no-submit-stale

The other miners (also pointing to the eu server) don't, which confuses me since this link (below) suggests it is to do with the server.

http://mining-tips.weebly.com/1/post/2014/01/-accepted-untracked-stratum-share-from-pool-0.html

but that doesn't make any sense, because only one of my miners is doing this and all my miners are pointing to the same server..

Is there something obvious I'm missing ??

i have the same problem, should be on ~11mh/s, on about 8mh/s, all rigs ok, and on the eu server. where's tealover?

Read the hashcows thread....They have tried a lot of coins and the most profitable don't behave well for various reasons when they throw the whole pool hash rate at them.  I'm happy trusting them, the payouts I've had are well worth the non-hassle and risk of trying to keep up with a coin rating site. Also check out coinchoose, dustcoin, coinwarz....they all rate coins differently..

i've been mining on hashcows for the last few weeks now, and it is a great service and top operators. I love this site. They have been upgrading, I guess to deal with the load increase, and most things seem fixed now so that's great.

My BTC balances go up and down, but that is the nature of this and I'm fine with that. However I'm still showing zero balances on mature and immature rounds, this confuses me because the problem rounds are random (different in duration, so it isn't a reconnect delay on short rounds as pointed out on recent posts) and I'm converting all my coins to BTC. It isn't also the miner, it is a 5MHash machine, running cgminer 3.6.1 and ran very stable on other pools before this one. It also ran stably on this pool before the problems, reporting a non zero balance on all rounds.

The zero balance rounds are 5214-5217,5219,5222,5232,5234,5237,5241,5242 so far.

Cos I'm a newbie, I can't post directly on the hashcows thread, so I'm putting it here in the hope it gets picked up.

thanks

cuesta