only thing I can think of is a pool operator setting ungodly pool fees without reflecting it on their web site. As difficulties are constantly raising it would be hard to catch a small shift in a pool fee that was not made clear on the website but if you see your mining profits that normally decrease by 10% over the course of a day (for sake of easy numbers) suddenly drop by 30% in a day you may wish to ask yourself if that pools operator is all that trustworthy.

As others have pointed out electricity costs are a big factor in daily profit but one also needs to figure in hardware costs, maintenance costs, transaction costs, price per coin, tax costs... and I'm probably still leaving things off the list. It's best to do your own research based off your own situation, tho I will say that from what I've looked into the best option I've came across is finding a newer solid sounding coin that your hardware can handle easily to mine then hold for a price adjustment depending on your local laws.

I've stalked around the forums quite a bit before finally taking the plunge and joining, I've also stalked around many sites about coins/ico's/etc but have been reluctant or down right too poor to actually leverage my wallet into buying into a currency. I've tried mining, and decided my ancient tech cobbled together from bits of several "grandma's first computer" level machines just can't cut it with it's circa point 5kh/s speeds on most currencies. So I've decided to take another approach to joining the crypto realm.

I am no stranger to coding, I'm self-taught in the ways of batch script, http, css, and went to college for computer networking and administration including fedora (linux) and cisco routing. The transition into coding for crypto applications has been rather dicey tho, and so I come asking for tutorials, follow at your own pace projects, or even just pointers as to where to start my coding spree. Of course I will also be doing my share of diligence by dusting off some of my old school books to see if I can find anything relevant as well as combing over google results.

Any insights would be extremely helpful, so thank you in advance!



To be 100% clear on my intentions with the research my long term goal is to make my own currency, exchange, miner, wallet, and any other crypto related thing I can think of for the practice alone, and although it may be practice I still do wish to get into the security aspect of things in case I decide to bloom into more practical (and useful) projects at a later date.