Confusing ETH mining results via MinerGate - seem WAY to low

[GabryRox]

Hello everyone... I just built a mining rig that will eventually have 4-5 MSI RX 470's running. I currently have 3 hooked up, all mining ETH via MinerGate at an average hash-rate of 19.4 Mh/s each, so a total hash-rate of just over 58 Mh/s.

Over the weekend, I had this rig mining ETH with 1-2 470's and the mined amounts were in-line with what I expected at that hash-rate... overnight running 2 470's yielded in the range of .08-.10 ETH.

However, in the last 10 hours, despite running that whole time at ~58 Mh/s, I have essentially seen no increase in my mined amount of ETH. Last night it was about .26x and now stands at .2653... so not even .01 in 10 hours!  It also seemed slow during the day yesterday but I chalked it up to the fact that my rig was offline of a couple of hours. But, with a 50% increased hash-rate vs the previous night, I expected to be seeing around .13-.14 and it didn't even come close to that.

So, my question is... is this normal for ETH mining?  I have only been mining XMR via CPU the past 4-5 weeks and it provides relatively smooth results. Does ETH have huge peaks and valleys like this?  Or, is this something that is more likely due to using MinerGate?

Any thoughts would be appreciated as at this point, it feels like I am just using electricity for nothing.

[snowyNNN]

First of all Minergate is a small pool. The overall hashrate is only about 10 GH/s. With that hashrate the pool finds approximately 10 blocks per day. So there might be a 24-hour period when the pool finds only a few or even no blocks at all. Conversely, the pool might find 20 blocks.

Miner only gets rewarded Eth when a block is found and confirmed. https://minergate.com/pool-stats/eth - THERE WE SEE WHY YOUR BALANCE HASN´T INCREASED. There are found blocks unconfirmed. It is yet unclear will they be good blocks or will they be discarded. There has been an onslaught of attacks against Ethereum network Which has caused problems for mining pools.

Anyway, just a day or couple of mining is not a significant sample size especially on a small pool like Minergate.



                                                                        Happy mining!

[GabryRox]

Thanks for the info!  Indeed there is a big issue with this pool, as now 4 blocks in a row from late Sunday/early Monday have been orphaned and still the 11 blocks mined since then are still pending!  So, no confirmed blocks in almost 3 days now, which is unacceptable.  I am already looking to get into another pool (leaning towards EthPool) and a better miner (probably Claymore's) so this kind of nonsense will be at least minimized.

[snowyNNN]

The rest of those blocks will very likely be discarded as their pool is not working right now.

They let miners mine for nothing...

Minergate is an ok beginners pool. I wish they´d be more open of what´s happening there but they obviously don´t have too many employees.

My guess is that their Eth mining will be fixed tomorrow. Maybe. I have one pc with Ubuntu and I can only use Minergate app to mine with it.

I went for a more reliable pool aswell..And Claymore rocks!

[Ambros]

Minergate is awesome if it's the first time you mine and i wanna get a taste without too much headache, but since you have that hardware i think that you should change your miner.
My personal advice is claymore, it's very simple to use and in the readme you can find a pre-build example to launch it with your pool!

[Za1n]

Minergate is awesome if it's the first time you mine and i wanna get a taste without too much headache, but since you have that hardware i think that you should change your miner.
My personal advice is claymore, it's very simple to use and in the readme you can find a pre-build example to launch it with your pool!

Well said. I have to agree that once you invest in 4-5 cards and a dedicated mining rig, you need to move past the beginner pools and onto a more solid one. There are several larger and more stable pools for Ethereum that you can choose from and most of them provide example configurations for the more popular mining software such as Claymore, so even if you are new you should be up and going in no time. You can also ask on this forum if you run into any difficulty switching to a new pool.

[GabryRox]

Thanks to all for the input and validation. I just checked and all of the blocks from the 36-hour period I was mining ETH via MinerGate have indeed been orphaned. They did since have a run of 5 straight Unlocked blocks but then another 2 orphaned.  Since this debacle I have just pointed my 3 GPUs to Monero via Minergate to at least get something, but even that has been a joke, averaging a paltry 130-140 H/s per card over the past few days! These cards should be pulling AT LEAST 500 H/s on Monero but are getting 1/3rd of that via this bad software, so as soon as the weekend hits, I am going to go heads-down in order to start mining with Claymore!

I still will need to find a good pool for ETH and probably XMR as well.  For ETH, someone recommended Ethermine.org.  As some here have mentioned, they actually do have a section on their main screen with specific set-up scripts for Claymore, so hopefully I can figure it out.  But, if anyone has any other recommendations I would be happy to hear them. 

From looking at the setup script, it seems apparent that in addition to the miner and pool, I will need a specific ETH wallet (and eventually XMR too).  I have a question about this... I actually have a Coinbase account and in addition to a BTC wallet, it also shows that I have an ETH wallet.  However, when I click on it to get the address, it shows a disclaimer saying something to the effect that "do not use this address for ETH mining rewards".  Does this mean that this wallet will not work with a Claymore/Ethermine combo?  If not, then can someone recommend a good ETH wallet as well? 

Thanks!

[Ambros]

IMHO The best choice si Jaxx