Is algo switching worth it for small - medium scale miners?

[newmz]

Hi - this has been buzzing around in my brain for quite a while so I just wondered what other people think or know about this subject. I haven't done actual measurement or calculation so if anyone else has I'd love to hear about it.

I've been mining now for at least 2 years. Can't remember exactly when I started but I do remember that when I did ETH was around $10 and BTC was around $600. I started with AMD & spent a long time using R9 290s, but now I transitioned to Nvidia 1060s, 1070s and (unfortunately) 1080s, mostly because of power efficiency when I have to pay around $0.17/kWh for energy.

I have never had more than 3 rigs running because I live in a pretty old house with shitty wiring. Although I am in a 240V AC country, I can still manage to trip a 16A breaker if the mining rigs are on, say neoscrypt, and I run the dishwasher and/or use the air-con.

So I have tried a few of the various algorithm auto-switching solutions, like for example nemosminer on zpool.ca or ahashpool.com, or switching between various coins on one algorithm like equihash at miningpoolhub.com. It's never ever been just "set and forget" like it is if you concentrate on one coin and set memory and core clocks for the best hash per watt - it's always been a situation where I have to compromise and work out which miners or algos are going to crash under which conditions the GPUs are set. Also it never seems to pay what is predicted, compared to when I mine a specific coin and accumulate enough so that all the little fees and exchanges don't take too much of the profit.

It seems to me that if you are auto switching based on calculations about CURRENT price, difficulty, etc and this changes or "switches" every couple of minutes or whatever: unless you hash a LOT of hash power so you are immediately gaining that advantage and converting to BTC within minutes, by the time you have mined a little bit of whatever the auto switch decides is good right now, it's already changed and you are now mining something that everyone else who is auto switching is also mining so the difficulty is through the roof and you are screwed. So those huge GPU farms out there where energy is cheap might do great auto switching, but people like me are better off just mining something obscure that looks like a good idea  & HODLing a lot of different obscure coins in the hope that one goes to the moon, or sticking to something established and relatively predictable and just making whatever profit I can manage. Right?

Does anyone out there with 2-4 rigs, or like 8 -20 GPUs think that they do better using some kind of auto-switching software and pool? If so I'd love to hear about what they use and how they have tweaked it.

Of course this is an argument purely about mining for profit. I have also often mined something just because I like the project or something or someone related to it. Sometimes that has meant I got really lucky if my instincts were correct and I end up with a few hundred or something that goes right up in price, and sometimes I end up with something worth a couple of cents that took weeks to mine.

Maybe I am stating the obvious to people who have worked all this stuff out, but I am interested to hear what other people in similar situations are doing.

[Geraldo]

In my Opinion 
As long as you do auto-switching in an auto-switching pool, it's okay, why? You will always have a Full Share to that mining pool even when they switch to other algorithms, because all of the switching processes handled by that mining pool.

But then, as you said, peoples including auto-switching pool have an almost same variable for counting profitable coins. Current price, Difficulty, Network Hashrate and so on. What does it mean? Peoples will be pointing to the same coin, and it will increase Network Hashrate which will affect the difficulty. And profitability will cut-off.

Some Old-Miner may be doing something different. Sometimes they do a Solo-Mining with new coins, but of course, they have own calculation method with that. Sometimes they mine the solid coins and hold it for a few time. And many more.

Personally, I didn't do auto-switching. I have a few rig for solid coins and the other rig doing high mobility mining (didn't mean I'm the Old Miner. lol)

[newmz]

In my Opinion 
As long as you do auto-switching in an auto-switching pool, it's okay, why? You will always have a Full Share to that mining pool even when they switch to other algorithms, because all of the switching processes handled by that mining pool.

But then, as you said, peoples including auto-switching pool have an almost same variable for counting profitable coins. Current price, Difficulty, Network Hashrate and so on. What does it mean? Peoples will be pointing to the same coin, and it will increase Network Hashrate which will affect the difficulty. And profitability will cut-off.

Some Old-Miner may be doing something different. Sometimes they do a Solo-Mining with new coins, but of course, they have own calculation method with that. Sometimes they mine the solid coins and hold it for a few time. And many more.

Personally, I didn't do auto-switching. I have a few rig for solid coins and the other rig doing high mobility mining (didn't mean I'm the Old Miner. lol)

OK, yes your first point does make sense, and that's why I do often use switching at miningpoolhub.com but it's usually just one algorithm that switches between a few coins, which has most recently been equihash, but then I noticed in the last week that the price of ZCL completely fell off a cliff, but the equihash auto switch kept switching to ZCL, even though it had dropped from over $100 to around $10. It didn't make any sense to me, but maybe the difficulty dropped so much as the price dropped that it was still worth it.... There is so much going on in the background between miners, pools and exchanges - and there are so many changes, forks & shitcoins to get distracted by!

This is really a hobby and a challenge to me that also happens to make money sometimes but I don't have the time to keep up with what is the best way anymore.

I have solo mined a few new coins. I solo mined a few NXS blocks when it was worth about $0.40. Now though it seems that the latest thing that happens is that the earliest people to a coin are starting masternodes. There are just way too many neoscrypt based DASH clones out there and the newest ones have like 20-100 masternodes which must belong to the devs, and I think they look like they are mostly scams.

I wouldn't call myself an old miner either - when I started I was buying used equipment from people who were mining litecoin in 2014. If they HODLed that LTC they must be rich now!