I'm finding huge discrepancies between the various websites claiming to show the currently most profitable alt coins.
Some of the websites I use are:
http://www.coinwarz.comhttp://dustcoin.com/mininghttp://www.wheretomine.com/ (Consistently gets the current difficulty for any given coin badly wrong!)
http://www.coinchoose.com/litecoin.phpI know profitability of alts is a very fluid situation, but still the discrepancies are massive and fairly consistent.
I wonder if we can get a consensus on which services offer the most accurate profitability rating as a reference point for all alt miners.
No. Those sites vary because none of them check difficulty of mining often enough and some don't stay current even on little things such as when a coin
drops its block reward in half.
They all must rely on 3rd/4th party exchange api price information, which adds another place for error to creep in and requires frequent updating
that doesn't always get done. An exampple- a few weeks ago Cryptsy was reporting 'stuck' high bid prices that did not actually exist, which in turn
caused all the above sites to report wrong values for days.
Several coins have special features that make pricing difficult to pinpoint, such as LuckyCoin paying extra blocks randomly but regularly, or others that pay interest to hold instead of sell. Pricing reports mostly ignore inconvenient features and thus can't report accurately.
You should not use any of the sites above to pick what to mine, other than as rough guidelines. Always compare their listed difficulty and price, and know the quirks of each coin you are considering. Some, like Spots, are very profitable but only for minutes at a time while others, like Elacoin, keep their same difficulty for days. I always consider the listings at CoinChoose first, because they have a column for profitability that considers Stale shares, which is another factor that can cost anyone 30% of their profits easily if you dont know what to expect from the faster coins. After that I look at Coinwarz, then distantly to coinpolice, wheretomine, and criptovalute.it .
If you really want to powergame it with more risk, of course read the altcoin area at bitcointalk to find newer coins that arent on the profit charts yet but are trading on a exchange you have actually heard of and at favorable difficulty/reward rates but only if the exchange has developed some volume. Dogecoin was record-level profitable for a long while before Coinwarz finally began listing- people who only look at coinchoose missed it entirely as they never listed it at all.
So-
short version- no there isnt a most accurate profitabilty site since none of them look at difficulty and other factors frequently enough, many coins have unique attributes that the sites dont know how to consider, and all the sites must rely on occasionally shaky price data that even when accurate also is not updated often enough.
