Antminer on Nicehash, worth it?

[Odetas]

Apologies in advance if this has been covered elsewhere, search sucked.  Is it worth it to use an Antminer on Nicehash?  With the trouble of updating CGMiner to their preferred version, etc. is there better payout there with an Antminer than just going with a standard pool?

[Liquid71]

You should be able to easily add extranonce to your antminer just by adding #xnsub at the end of the pool in the gui, the example from nicehash website
stratum+tcp://sha256.[location].nicehash.com:port_num#xnsub

If you have an older antminer and that doesn't work then try mining rig rentals, you'd probably make more on mining rig rentals anyway. You mine on a regular pool, and when it's rented it will automatically switch from mining for you to the renters pool. https://www.miningrigrentals.com/

My favorite pool by far is Slush so I hate recommending this, but if you use mining rig rentals since your rig could be rented at any time it might be smart to use a pool that pays per share pps for your bitcoin mining. This way if your rig is rented in the middle of a round you don't lose credit for the work you submitted if a block isn't found for awhile on your pool, with pps you'll get paid for your work even if you only mine for five minutes before the rig is rented again.

[kano]

Apologies in advance if this has been covered elsewhere, search sucked.  Is it worth it to use an Antminer on Nicehash?  With the trouble of updating CGMiner to their preferred version, etc. is there better payout there with an Antminer than just going with a standard pool?

No, the payouts on nicehash and MRR are not better than most PPLNS pool mining. They are worse.

PPS is a very low payout system compared to low fee PPLNS.

None of their "way better returns" are long term either, they just pick calculated points in time where there are fools willing to pay high rental rates, short term, and falsely advertise them as something you expect to get long term.

On my PPLNS pool, where you expect to get the best return of every pool, miners get 99.1% of all the blocks and transaction fees we find, yep the fee is only 0.9%
Yep that's also less than half the fee of Slush.

Also, any 'unpaid work' comments about comparing PPLNS to PPS just means the commenter doesn't understand the statistics of how PPLNS works.
The chance of having unpaid shares is expected to be covered by the chance of having overpaid shares.
PPLNS just has higher variance than PPS, and if you don't mine continuously you simply expect sometimes to get overpaid and sometimes to get underpaid, but longer term, you expect it to average out, and when compared to PPS, you expect it to average out better.
The less % of time you mine at a PPLNS pool, the longer you expect that variance to take to average out.

[kritment]

hi Odetas
Just want to add my 10 cents here without the wider Nicehash lovers trying to crucify me.

Background - I am a Crypto investor for the last 3 years (only invested little dollars, I wish I had invested more) who found sudden love for mining. Yes i know its a little ass backwards. 2 months ago dumped close to 40K in mining equipment mix of BTC, LTC, ETH and X11 mostly from our lovely friends at Bitmain, Avalon, and Ibelink. So had to do some rapid learning on this to make sure I am maximizing my revenue. Currently generating some baby bucks on Antpool, Nicehash, Prohashing and Multipool. Talking to Mr. Kano to potentially move to his pool, he is a great guy with a positive attitude.

Now to the point, Nicehash is great but dont just put some numbers in the calculator and get excited. There is a lot more to it and the returns are significantly lower. This is for me and I am working with them to sort/optimize this. Rule of thumb whatever your hash power is reduce this by 10% to manage your return expectations. They seem to have 5-8% high reject rate for me as compared to other pools. Again like I said we are working on optimizing this, its not an accusation just my personal experience. Then please dont add numbers here and get super excited https://new.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator this is a mere depiction for past 30 days and generally IMO 8-14% off.

Infact to get a more accurate picture have a look here https://new.nicehash.com/algorithm and reduce by 1-3%, this is much more inline with what you can expect moving forward. I have my own formula which I use to plan my expected payments for the next 30 days and has been +-5% inline with actual payouts and works for me. Please note it may not for you, use it on your own risk.

Basically reduce the payout by 0.032% every day. I am currently working on an a macro so it go into more detail by directly factoring in difficulty increase and historical (payout, demand and availability) correlation.  Happy to share when ready so everyone can use for their own benefit and comment on it.

Anyways hope this helps you, happy mining!



 

[oawan]

I mine on Kano's pool and believe his to be best. 

But I also have my miners set with pool #1 as nicehash with a threshold.  So 98% of the time when the price is below the threshold, they mine on Kano.is.  But if the price nicehash is paying rises above a certain point, they will temporarily switch and mine on Nicehash for a higher % return. 

[petaka18]

With all due respect, how can kano be more profitable with mining approximately 2 blocks per day, i would be super happy if i understand the math behind that. Tomorrow i will receive a batch of 30 miners and would gladly point them that way but so far in my expirience nicehash provides better ROI

[kano]

With all due respect, how can kano be more profitable with mining approximately 2 blocks per day, i would be super happy if i understand the math behind that. Tomorrow i will receive a batch of 30 miners and would gladly point them that way but so far in my expirience nicehash provides better ROI

The number of blocks mined per day makes little difference unless the pool is too small and thus lots of your shares get paid in later diff changes at lower value.

What you are rewarded per block is related to your fraction of the work.
If you are on a pool that averages half the number of blocks we do, then you'd expect to be rewarded twice as much per block, if they had the same fees.
i.e. you'd average half as many rewards, but twice as much per reward.

If you are on a pool that averages twice as many as we do, then the opposite is the case:
i.e. you'd average twice as many rewards, but half as much per reward.

Really what mattes is:
1) The pool fees
2) The pool is 'big enough' to not undervalue your shares

On my pool, all BTC that comes in to the pool, 99.1% is rewarded to the miners.
Over time we of course expect to average 100% luck + block txn fees - orphans, so you are expected to get greater than any long term PPS pool reward.

On nice hash they give you ~94% of the money they get from the people who rent your miners.
They keep ~3% of what the renter pays nice hash, then they give you ~97% of what's left over.
i.e. they charge you a 3% fee and the renter a 3% fee.
So nicehash is only paying you more, on average, if the person renting your miners is willing to pay ~6% more than you would average mining on my pool.

At the moment the 'expected' reward, based on the tx fees for the last 9 days, which have dropped since last month, is 99.1% * 105.6% - orphans
i.e. 104.6% PPS - orphans if we get any this month.
That's the continuous 'expected' reward on my pool at the moment.

As a miner, renting their miners on nice hash, to get that continuously on nice hash, the person paying to rent the miners would always have to be paying more than ~110.9% PPS

Now if you can find someone - all the time who is willing to pay more than that to rent your miners, then you'd expect, on average to be ahead of mining on my pool.

There's also the actual rewards for the last 7 months on my pool, that have averaged 124% PPS on my pool, but that's just luck ... for 7 months
https://kano.is/index.php?k=pblocks