Questions about Altcoins Mining in Multipools

[Leinaded]

Hi all. I've been looking at some guides about mining alternative cryptocurrencies and some questions have come to my mind. I will formulate my questions after claims made by these guides to help me clarify if I have understood the concepts well.

Claim: The strategy basically consists in whenever you spot a profitable coin based on different parameters, among them avg. difficulty and exchange rate, you would mine and exchange it for your desired cryptocoin, usually bitcoin, while the profitable situation of said altcoin lasts. This applied to my plan would be to buy a scrypt ASIC and mine profitable scrypt coins since there are many more (52 by coinwarz) than coins based on other algos for GPU mining (14). In the future it is possible that it is better to invest in a GPU rig as more altcoins which use new algorythms are developed but that is a topic for another thread.

Question: In the multipool I've seen here you can't control what altcoin you are mining. In this particular case the user mines using scrypt algorithm and the pool assigns different arbitrary scrypt altcoins by its own priorities and then makes the payout in the user's desired coin when the total value of the different coins in her account reach an exchange rate limit equal to the programmed value for the payout of the selected coin.
Does not this invalidate the profitability since the strategy depends on you being able to choose the coin you mine based on its difficulty and rate? If the pool assigns a higher difficulty coin to you or one with an exchange rate that is unfavorable the strategy mentioned in claim cannot be applied profitably. Are all multipools like this one where you can't control what altcoin you are mining? How is that profitable with a scrypt ASIC for example?

Claim: As the number of altcoins mined increases it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of statistics like difficulty and exchange rate in order to double check if your hashing power is being honestly used by the multipool. That is checking if the number of satoshi you receive on your wallet is equal to what you've calculated based on your hashing power, your chosen altcoins and their statistics.

Question: How complicated checking into this gets? Is it simple enough to just need a spreadsheet? If it gets complicated do you use some kind of programming language script or only just trust in the honesty of the multipool?

[smarterhash]

excellent questions

be careful what sites you rely on for mining income estimates

Please take a look here and take a look at the other videos we have posted.

I wish I had more time right now because I'd give you some feedback and observations on your questions because they are excellent and well thought out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YipTs8oGH54

it's important to remember that coins are not bottomless pits of money - each coin ONLY generates a set number of blocks per day regardless of of how much hashing power you throw at it. The higher the network hash on a coin the smaller the amount each mhs earns from that coin because you have more hashing power power competing for a fixed number of blocks.

GPU gives you the most flexibility when it comes to having a choice of which altcoins to mine.  With Asic you are locked in to Scrypt only. Sadly the GPU's cannot compete with Asics when it comes to scrypt coin mining power.

[Leinaded]

Thanks a lot for the info on your webpage.

The error is still present at coinwarz an even worse with other coins with much lower estimated profits (Globalcoin for example has est. profits of 1.02$ while I calculated like 23$ under optimal conditions). Imo I can only imagine that is an error on purpose by coinwarz, I suppose that as in any economy the exclusivity of information is key to profitability, here is not different. Misleading estimated profits makes everyone follow coinwarz disinformation while you mine the real profitable cryptocoins with almost no competition. With their associated website rigwarz with comparisons and advice on mining rigs I can only imagine the disinfo may get even worse lol.

I guess it would not be difficult to script something to pull reliable coin's stats from the web and make your own accurate estimations on profitability. Your pool and videos seems a good choice but what strategy do you use in your pool?

Correct me if I'm wrong but you are saying that more hashing power doesn't equate to more coins as it is always tied to the fixed blocks produced in a day. So in other words you are trying to convey that pool owners assign the coin pool clients' hashing power is used for because of this reason but how can you assure that the pool owner is doing that in favor of the users and not her own on top of the fees she charges? By what I understand (not much since I'm learning) a miner (or pool) almost always are competing with others for those fixed blocks in a day so since the profitability is based on parameters like difficulty among others it should be fair to let pool users choose what coin they mine. The algorythm used to estimate a coin's profitability could be a topic for another thread but as a base it should rely on a relation of exchange rate and difficulty. If the user can't manage that on multipools how can it be a profitability for her? Do you let your users choose what coin they are using their hashing power on or assign them by your own priorities and then exchange them for the user desired coin to make payouts? If you manage your pool assigning coins by your own priorities what is the reasoning behind that?

If the reasoning is optimising the profitability for the pool's users why offering different coins at your website and not just different algos and then offer detailed and thorough statistics so the users can calculate by their own how their hashing power is being used and how the pool's profits are being fairly distributed? Maybe I don't understand it but the flaw of this system is that when the payout is made the exchange rate has changed so a pool owner could use that to her own advantage and even if she doesn't the profitability for the user depends on chance, so by what I understand the system is shady and should be as clear as possible. Imo (always from the point of view of the strategy I mentioned in the 1st post) the coins mined should be converted to the user desired coin as soon as possible to keep the estimation of profitability high while it lasts. Your pool's videos are a good initiative and maybe as a suggestion you could use them to teach your viewers what algorythm you are using to establish profitability and how users can check by themselves how the amount of coins they receive matches the hashing power they are contributing and the different kinds of coins they've mined until payout. In other words, let them have a way to check by themselves, without having to trust in your information, if what they are receiving is fair and equal to what they're contributing. Imo any multipool fees should be earned only for offering their users a way to mine multiple coins easily without having to install multiple wallets and mine them solo.

Conclusion: there's nothing that can substitute a person own research and work. Investigate any claim by anyone, more so if it is money related and check it for yourself.

[hdmediaservices]

Smarterhash definitely offers you the best statistics in one place and is a good resource to many -- but you also need to know more about a coin then just the # of blocks it will generate, etc. etc.  You need to follow the coin in the forums, keep track of what pools are mining what coins / with how much hash, watch the exchanges and create your own strategy.

Obviously many people are going to want to mine a coin that shows high profit potential.  The problem is that when everyone starts to mine it, the profitability declines quickly -- so statistics alone won't do you well overall.  You need a strategy.  And you should keep that strategy secret.  LOL

With mining -- you have hobby-types -- that are making a couple BTC a month and then you have others that are making some decent money.  Each type will have very different strategies based on the amount of hash in their arsenal.

Most people think Altcoins are manipulated on just the exchanges -- pumping and dumping.  But there is a lot more manipulation going on with hash power.  So many games and strategic maneuvers going on out there and most don't even realize it -- instead they just plug in their formulas, look at their graphs and point their miners accordingly.

[Leinaded]

Thanks for your answer hdmedia,

Since my strategy is not rocket science and not profitable I don't mind sharing what I'm trying to do right now LoL. Stats alone won't do me any good but at least they are giving me some direction of where to look at. Right now what I'm trying to do is pulling data from the net of all the different scrypt coins, I estimate the number of coins I'd produce daily with my hashrate and multiply that for an average of the coin exchange rate to establish a basic estimation of a coin's profitability.

The problem comes with the formulas I'm using since I'm estimating my daily production based on:

                              total daily prod. of a coin * my hashrate
my daily production = ---------------------------------------
                                  (network hashrate + my hashrate)

As you see is a very lacking formula since I don't take into account the network and pool's difficulty, etc. So when I check my estimation with what I produce in my pool it doesn't match at all. Any help to improve the formula will be appreciated hehe ^_^ Although is a lacking formula it helps me watching what coins have potential when I use that data with webpages that monitor a coin's developer activity or popularity in social media (as you say monitor the forums). The main question I'm trying to solve is that if a 1k $ investment in a scrypt ASIC (that's the cheapest $/MH ASICs I've found) would have a better ROI than if I use those 1k for trading cryptocurrencies at an exchange exclusively and/or in FOREX diversifying the investment.

[hdmediaservices]

You can't predict the total daily production of coins and network hash rate of any coin for any day but the previous.  There might be trends -- but for most coins -- nothing is concrete. 

So you should definitely take the $1k and just buy coins. 

[Leinaded]

Thanks,

Most definitively trading allows for more diversification of the investment than sticking to mining scrypt coins so you're right on the former being the safest option but what intrigued me was what you mentioned about hobby type miners earning 1-2 BTC per month. That, myself being a beginner, is pretty serious money for a hobbyist, do you mind sharing what kind of investment in mining equipment what you consider a hobbyist would need to earn that amount in that period of time? Also the type of equipment would be an ASIC or a graphic cards array?

Take care.

P. S. Also I notice that although being a sr. member and pretty active here you haven't signed a signature campaign so you must know about what you're talking about if you don't need that extra money for your posts

[KNCFUN]

So which are the pools that you can control what altcoin you are mining  

[Leinaded]

So which are the pools that you can control what altcoin you are mining  

Right now I'm trying this pool that only allows scrypt coins. But I guess there must be many more in the section where it is.

[KNCFUN]

Thanks, looks good

[hdmediaservices]

I like Hash-to-Coins.com

[Leinaded]

I like Hash-to-Coins.com

Thanks for sharing hd. Do you know how long it takes for the coins you mine to appear in your pool account? I've been mining errorcoin for two days in the pool I'm testing right now and no balance yet on my account nor any answer in pool's thread. Is that normal?

[hdmediaservices]

I like Hash-to-Coins.com

Thanks for sharing hd. Do you know how long it takes for the coins you mine to appear in your pool account? I've been mining errorcoin for two days in the pool I'm testing right now and no balance yet on my account nor any answer in pool's thread. Is that normal?

Well - with hash-to-coins -- you type in a wallet address for every coin that you want to mine.

The coins go directly to your wallets after they have confirmed the proper # of times if setup correctly.  You tell the pool at what threshold to deposit the coins into your wallet.  Everything is automatic.

[Leinaded]

Well - with hash-to-coins -- you type in a wallet address for every coin that you want to mine.
The coins go directly to your wallets after they have confirmed the proper # of times if setup correctly.  You tell the pool at what threshold to deposit the coins into your wallet.  Everything is automatic.

Same as where I'm at, there's a section where you can see all your balances for each wallet and another for the transactions but there's something really strange as today I'm changed my miner to mooncoin and the balance on its account has started to increase this same day but the last two days of mining errorcoin hasn't increased my balance in ERR although the coin and pool stratum proxy are perfectly operational. My miner has been giving me an avg. of 99,4% sharerate this whole time.

If this isn't solved soon (still no answer from the owner yet) I'll switch to your pool and see if it works better. They won't miss me much since my hashpower is low but I do not like to spend electricity for another person.