Important facts bolded, tl;dr at the endHi people, new account here!
I recently got into GPU mining, and I started off mining Zcash on Flypool, but since I'm a bit of an optimization freak, over the last weeks I've been questing for more profitable ways to mine.
With what I know today, it seems to be that profit switching is the best option, and for that most people (including me) turn to multi-algo pools. It's obvious NiceHash will be the least profitable but
MiningPoolHub and Zpool are two good candidates for the most profitable mining system.
There's another thread on this forum (first result on Google) where the author runs a 7-day profit comparison test between these two, and according to the results
Zpool wins by a factor of ~5%. I dug a little deeper to find out the specific differences between the pools that could cause this. I don't pretend that it is a complete analysis but simply a collection of facts and data I collected.
- The payout system is PPS on Zpool and PPLNS on MPH
You can Google these if you're not familiar with these terms, but essentially, PPLNS as used on MPH is a system that discourages "pool hopping", or switching what you're mining too often. Zpool on the other hand uses the more simple PPS system, which does no such thing.
This means that Zpool is better if you're constantly switching to the most profitable algo, while MPH is better if you're manually choosing what you mine or if you use daily averages for auto switching (therefore switching less often).
- The stats on Zpool refresh every 7 minutes* while those on MPH refresh every 30 minutes (at :14 and :44).
This is just one more reason to use Zpool if you use automatic profit switching. However, be careful about using Zpool's preferred profit switching method (a batch file that cycles through mining algorithms). In my experience, switching this way can take up to a few minutes depending on how many algos you're using, which is a lot of lost time if you're switching every 7, 14 or 21 minutes. Prefer scripts such as MultiPoolMiner or Awesome Miner's profit switching feature.
On MPH, you're better off using averages if you're doing auto profit switching, since you want to mine what is most profitable *on average* instead of switching to the coin that just happens to be most profitable when you refresh.
*N.B. My logs show that every once in a while Zpool's stat don't update for ~20 minutes. Could be on their side or maybe they just got tired of my tests and me querying their API every minute
- Stats on both sites do not match
This one I don't understand and if anyone has an idea, please enlighten me. It might be that they average over different periods, or that MPH is delayed. By tracking the block difficulty of FTC over an hour and comparing it to the profitability stats that Zpool updates every 7 minutes, it seems that Zpool's stats follow the actual network difficulty pretty fast, but I don't know about MPH (and even if it did, 30 minutes refresh time is way too long to do high-speed profit switching).
tl;dr: I don't pretend this analysis is complete, but Zpool seems to be most profitable for fast algo switching to exploit the network difficulty variations, and MPH is best for manual or slow automatic switching, and also kinder towards the cryptocurrencies since it won't destabilize them with many people constantly hopping in and out of them.Hope anyone finds this useful, and please don't hesitate to voice yourself if you disagree with something or have something to add![/list]
