LD;DR - It's pretty good here, but could be better.

So I've been trying to compare CM with MC, and so far this is what I've found:

-Rejects are high here, that's for sure.  Why?  Well, maybe it's the fast coin switch, or the latency, or the quick growth of the pool, or something to do with the code, not really sure.  You'd think that fast coins should give stales, and not rejects, but I'm sure eventually we'll have more of a concrete answer on this.  As an example, I've been averaging 15-20% rejects here, whereas I've normally had <0.5% rejects.

-Hash-rate seems MUCH lower here, and very inconsistent -- Normally one would expect to take their own hash rate, multiply it by the profit per MH per day number, and get your result.  But with such high rejects, hash-rates are gimped.  A few things to say about that though; it's amazing that the pool is so profitable even considering the high rejects and if we can get those rejects down we're all going to be mega-super-rich!

-An unfortunate side-effect of the unstable / unpredictable hash-rates and abnormally high rejects create a bit of a distrustful environment, at least imho.  This is probably just a lack of education on what's happening, and why it's happening specifically here and not on other pools, so far as I've heard anyways.

-Even with the rejects and inconsistent hash-rate, the profits here seem to be good.  Although my tests weren't the best due to some slight differences in the rigs I used, I've found that at least over the past few days, CM has given significantly better returns than MC.  If you add in the bit of extra transparency, and the 1.x% less fees vs MC, over-all I'm happy to put my hashes here for now.

I was on Middlecoin for a few months, and had some amazing days (ie 0.118 BTC for a single day in Dec with ~3.2 MH), but the lack of transparency, and the recent meh returns has me thinking that this or any other decent profitability pool could have done pretty close to the same given market circumstances at the time.  

Stales at 0.65% (about what I'd expect my total rejects to be)
Rejects 18.75%.

I almost never see my rejects below 10%, and they often spike to 25-30%.

Mind you I've only been mining this pool for about a day, but I'm really trying to give it a good run before making any long-term decisions.  Just want to be sure I'm not bleeding shares.

Edit:  I saw your twitter feed, I'm trying to lower my intensity slightly (as per someone's suggestion on there) to see if that helps.  Bumping up from 19 to 20 was a change I made a few days ago, so I'll try at 19 and see if that helps at all.

Hate to be the necrohippoflogaphiliac here, but I'm still getting really high rejects (even after the tweaks you did), also my hashrate is all over the place when I know my CGRemote is showing a cool 2.0 MHash.

Please take a look http://www.clevermining.com/users/1M6ZozLvZoRhD6NLhtfcVB2aWcgtZhUG8w\

Ideas?  This is a rig I've mined with for months, and I've never had a high reject rate like this.

Thanks, I'll read through this.

After considerations, I think once I start back up, I think I'll re-choose the pools based on 2 things, 1) auto-exchange to BTC (that way were' measuring apple-to-apples), and 2) feedback from people here.

Suggestions on the best auto-exchanging-to-BTC pools?  I'll start collecting that list separate from my profit-pools list as above.

-MiddleCoin
-CleverMining
-CoinSolver
-??? (I'll have to check to see which pools currently do this)

Same card or different cards?  The hard part is leaving it there, stable, long enough to get a good reading (1-2 weeks I'd say).

Some of the profit switching pools will actually count rejects (usually only 1 round old rejects though).  Because of this, you might want to ensure that you don't use the --no-submit-stale flag.

Try a lower thread count.

I was getting similar, but error 4. 1 or 2 of my cards showing as 'off'..  I reduced my TC from 22400 (on a 3 x 280x rig) to 8193, and it started working. 

Superbit:  I'd strongly recommend being careful.  I recently sold <0.5 BTC via e-mail money transfer, received, everything was good.  A day or two later, debit card and online banking stops working -- I'm apparently under federal / criminal fraud investigation because the person who's bank account it came from is disputing the transaction.  Next thing you know, and going against everything I've been told or read on the bank's and interac's website, my bank is reversing the transaction.

Although they may not be reversible directly, my bank is taking it upon themselves to take my monies and send it to the 'victim', thereby making me the new victim.

Oh, and it's RBC that's giving me problems btw.  Waiting to hear from their elevated customer service team...

Good luck!

An unfortunate update.

So after about a day, I ended up having some hardware issues.  I went to make an adjustment, and apparently damaged a riser.  This caused things to go out of whack a little, and currently I'm running on 3 cards (just mining as normal).

Having said that, I've got some extra risers on the way, so once things are stable again, I will start them all back up.

The only one that truly paid out was Middlecoin so far:

0.01743666 BTC
http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/1QEbYHbh8bBvhTGEoNLYnAAWexXpfprSK1.html

For the others, it's a little harder to tell as there's a threshold before it pays out from the pool to cryptsy, and another threshold before cryptsy trades, trades getting stuck, etc.  Here's the "Estimated" Cryptsy balances after that first day:

UltimateCoinPool - 0.00849061 BTC
SwitcherCoin - 0.00768456 BTC
MultiPool - 0.00072981 BTC

Of course I'd like to get at least a week into solid mining on all four cards before making any real judgement, as I'm sure the pools are holding some value and it takes time to get a correct read from profit pools, so please hold off on speculation until then. 

I'll post again when I'm confident that my rig is stable.

Oh, I really can't complain about my experience with MiddleCoin, but I'm on a quest to discover the best.   

So far, UltimateCoinPool has been the quickest to cash out, as I've got 3 6 different currencies in that Cryptsy account already, and nothing in the others.   Might end up costing more in tx fees though, we'll see.

As for MiddleCoin, it normally goes straight to the BTC wallet at ~6:30pm PST (8:30 Eastern).

Here's some info, not sure if the other pools have public resources like this, anyone?

http://www.bfpcoin.com/middle-coin-web.php?w=1QEbYHbh8bBvhTGEoNLYnAAWexXpfprSK1&c=CAD

http://www.middlecoin.com/reports/1QEbYHbh8bBvhTGEoNLYnAAWexXpfprSK1.html (not up yet?)

Finally, can anyone with more experience with Cryptsy comment on the auto-sell choice I made?  Should I be using the sell instantly option?

TL;DR - Testing profitability pools with 1 card on each in hopes of finding the most profitable of them all!

Hi all,

I'm a small-time miner who's recently discovered profitability pools.  Thus far, I've been using Middlecoin, and have had some great days in the past.  My biggest (for ~3.2 MHashes) was ~0.118 BTC, and that was sometime in Dec.

Although MiddleCoin has been good to me, the ~4% fees are discouraging.  Because of this, I've been searching for someone who's really done some side-by-side testing of the various profitability pools, but so far have only really found opinions, and never any proper tests of identical rigs being split between them for a good chunk of time, at the same time, and tracking the difference.

The profitability pools I've heard of: (please comment and let me know about any I've missed!)

-MiddleCoin
-LTCRabbit
-MultiPool
-UltimateCoinPool
-SwitcherCoin
-HashCows
-HashBros
-WafflePool
-TradeMyBit
-CoinSolver
-CleverMining
-CoinMine

Being that I only have 1 rig and a laptop, I'm going to attempt to test with a single 7950 card on each of 4 different profitability pools.

They are:
Test Name - Pool Name - Bitref address (for your monitoring pleasure, pls no donations to these. )
ProfitTest0 - UltimateCoinPool - http://bitref.com/1NCAe4j6gxtAiEEJVeyaus7nmfCbE2gPZ6
ProfitTest1 - SwitcherCoin - http://bitref.com/1GQMbYRxSNpG4WFz6BqzB5WqGDfapR4WWd
ProfitTest2 - MultiPool - http://bitref.com/1APTjt8vR3QU7ubLddXVacWBJMqeVGnG7C
ProfitTest3 - MiddleCoin - http://bitref.com/1QEbYHbh8bBvhTGEoNLYnAAWexXpfprSK1

MiddleCoin automatically pays out in BTC, so it was easy enough.  The other three however, I needed to create a Cryptsy account for each (requiring an e-mail address for each), and manually configure each supported coin with addresses from Cryptsy into the pools configurations, and setup auto-sell in Cryptsy.    

I'll likely have to babysit each of these Cryptsy accounts, and it'll take a few days to start seeing the results in the BTC wallets, but I'll do my best to start them at the same time, stop them at the same time, and push balances out to wallets at the same time.

I should note a few things here:
-I wanted to include Hash Bros, but unfortunately their site was down at the time I was setting all of this up.  
-Although the cards are identical, and are OC'd with all of the same settings, there is a bit of a variance -- they generally range from 655-675 KHashes each (with card 0 being the lowest usually)
-For Cryptsy's auto-sell, I chose the 3rd option - 'Sell at 2nd highest sell bid' (highest price).
-I set configurable difficulties in pools to 256
-Auto-withdraw thresholds I did the minimums without incurring additional fees
-I'd love to do more pools, but unfortunately I'm just a lowly 1-rig miner with <2 BTC.  Other pools will have to wait, but I'm open to suggestions on which pools people want to see tested.
-I'm working towards a 2nd rig to add to the tests
-I unfortunately can't promise how long I'll test any given pool, but I'll try to give every pool I test a good run before deciding to drop it.

If you like what I'm doing, then please consider donating.  
( It'll help me test more pools.   )

BTC - 1E6RudZFarBZn34f6bg6jwxhqt44djzbE3
LTC - LaUeyDzDgah6qHRKmCF77dyYMUJrZELkav
Other - PST and I'll provide you with an address for the (hopefully Cryptsy supported) coin of your choosing

I'm also open to suggestions on how I can do this better, or more accurately.

I'm not so sure about that.  Have you seen CAD / USD lately?

http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=CAD&to=USD&view=1Y

Considering we've got $61+ Billion in circulation here in Canada, I would consider our dollar to be anything but stable. -10% over a year is volatile imho.

Besides, no cryptos are mature yet.  Once a crypto is completely mined out (in terms of new blocks of coin), then my best guess is that it would be no more or less stable than the CAD or USD.

I think this is covered in Ethereum.org/ethereum.html

It should be minable by cpu and gpu -- For Dagger, the optimal core:memory ratio will be 1:512MB, so I could see people mining on both.  I'm interested to see how cellphones and lower-powered cpus do in this environment.

Oh how I wish we could access testnet.  

---

Edit:


So they're not using sha256 or scrypt, they were planning to use Dagger, but now they're talking about a hybrid.  So I'm not sure if we'll start with dagger and switch later, or if the network doesn't go live until after that's all sorted out.  I assumed the network would be live in a week, but maybe not?

But it didn't coincide with anything, that's my point.  According to what it showed me, it was set to expire at midnight tonight (Pacific Time) -- but now it seems that nothing is happening at midnight tonight, the website was updated, there's new content and such to mull over, but that didn't align with midnight tonight.

My best guess is that there's legal stuff for them to finish sorting out, so they had to push it back.  Any official word on this?

I thought Ethereum was launching tonight at midnight, did that change?

I read through this forum waiting for someone to ask, but never saw the question.  I'm starting to think I had my dates wrong.

Maybe this has been asked before, but I'm not about to read 340 pages of posts to find out.

What happens when our difficulty is at 1024 but the network difficulty is at say, 300?  Does that mean that we're missing out on valid shares (and potentially blocks) that meet a difficulty of 300 to 1023?

I just don't get how we can only accept shares that are (significantly) higher in difficulty than the difficulty of the coin we're mining.

Anyone else have issues with their hash-rate not reporting correctly on the site?

I'm trying to test this pool with a lower-power machine I've got *coughalienwarelaptopcough* and I've got it hashing currently (due to needing a cleaning) at ~250 Khashes.

On the site, it fluctuates all over the place (ie from 80 to 220 usually), and often drops to 0 for a while here and there -- meanwhile I'm still connected to the pool and hashing away at those blazing speeds.

Is this an issue with the pool, or am I missing something?  I'd like to see some stability before moving any real hashing power over.

Aside from a rig, I have an Alienware M18x with dual 6990m's in it which I use as my gaming system, and for some supplemental hashing power.

When it's cool in the place, and the fans are all clean, I can get up to about 450kHashes off of the two GPUs combined.  CPU mining, as far as I'm concerned, wastes more power than it's worth. Unless you're mining at a pool which offers a PPS with a low difficulty of 32 or less (Scrypt), you probably won't get many shares accepted, and you'd probably want to hold onto whatever you mine for a while (of gaining value) to make it worth the power it cost you.  Imho, only GPU mining is viable, and only if you have a decent card.

You should also know that yes, heat will be an issue, as one day there'll be a bit too much dust, or it'll get a little too hot, and suddenly your mid 70's temperature is almost at the boiling point, and you very well could fry a card or worse.

Having said that, I accept the risks, and I keep my intensity down on my primary card (it seems to get hotter, quicker), so I'm getting ~230 out of one card and ~130 out of the primary card, and it's pretty stable.  I can even play some games without a problem while it's hashing at this rate.

Use a calculator to check profitability, a simple one is at dustcoin.com/mining

Just a thought, but maybe you could setup batch files for each pool (same settings, but have the primary and secondary pools reversed, but still backing up to the other)

Use windows task scheduler to start/stop each.

Good luck!

I just found about Middlecoin and wanted to try mining them for a short while to see how profitable it would be compared to straight LTC, as I've been mining.

I mine on a 4 x 7950 rig, as well as my alienware laptop with dual 6990m's.  (I know, and understand the risks)

Middlecoin seems to use 512 as the minimum difficulty, whereas once I connect, I often see difficulties in the 130-150 range.  What I'm wondering is, is everyone in the pool missing submitting valid shares to the network because the pool is telling them the static 512 diff even if it's actually lower?

Maybe I mis-understand how the whole deal works, but I'm just used to difficulties that are much higher, maybe the difficulty I'm seeing is inaccurate?

Also I notice that most of the time, my laptop is just sitting there doing nothing.  Proportionally, it should be the same as the rig or anything else mining the network, but the 512 diff seems to cause the laptop to perform poorly.

Thoughts?

(P.S. I would post to the right middlecoin thread, but I'm a noob apparently)