Profit switching - thoughts?

[jsj101]

Hi,

I'm currently auto-switching between alt coins based on calculated profitability. Along the lines of what the nicehash miner is doing except I use my own program so that I am mining actual coins and connecting to pools, and not receiving the equivalent BTC.
Based on what I've discovered during this process is that the biggest affect on calculated profitability is the network difficulty.

How often do you think it would be wise to fetch network difficulty and recalculate profitability? My concern is if I do this too often I'm quickly swapping coins regularly and end up with small shares off each pools mined block. But I don't want to fetch difficulty too infrequently that I am wasting time not mining the most profitable.

Does anyone else mine altcoins with this tactic, what approach are you taking to swapping?

Thanks,

[Liquid71]

profitability is based on mining the altcoin that earns the most BTC possible, so if you're not selling the coins for BTC right away then there's no sense in switching based on profitability. The most profitable coin might have high difficulty earning a low amount of coins but those coins have a higher price when converted to Bitcoin so it's the most profitable at that moment. The price can change so if you're not converting to Bitcoin you would be better off mining the coins with lowest difficulty.
If you are looking to accumulate altcoins mining I'd suggest finding the coins you are most interested in, and then switch between them based on difficulty, if the difficulty is low you'll earn more coins so that's the most "profitable" way to mine when the goal is to accumulate the most altcoins possible. If you get a coin that has a really low difficulty and is being ignored by other miners you can accumulate them faster and if the price goes up later you'll make a lot more than if mining the most profitable coin at that moment and converting directly to bitcoin like most people, however you could also get stuck holding the bag full of shitcoins if the coin never goes back up in price. Risk reward.

[kotarius]

I would not bother switching. Usually one coin is much more profitable (ethereum, for example) than all the rest.

[grrrgrrr]

I just implemented switching every 30 seconds. When wallet solo mining the loss due to switching seems minimal. Also wallets have apis for difficulty, so you can query as frequently as you want. I'm running 10s of full nodes atm. The best miners may be missing support of some wallet protocols so you still need to use pools.

Some pools (notably ftc.tbf and mona.asicpool) are close to calculation while some others pay not nearly as much. Gotta try some.

[ivan1975]

Is there really any benefit from such switching?