[ANN][Pool][Profit-Switch][Optional Auto-Exchange per Coin][Vardiff] ~ Hashcows

[Spiffy_1]

I don't know why you'd use the exchange to btc feature anyways..  It's another fee on something you can easily do yourself and get more btc.  And if you tell me you don't have time to exchange your coins then clearly you either have a hash rate through the roof or you shouldn't be mining in the first place.  Since I joined this pool people whine about the btc they get.  Pages upon pages of it.  If its that big an issue for everyone then I vote to remove the exchange to btc function and be done with it.

[C3ALL]

Why would you think there are only two reasons that people would not have time to exchange coins?

I dont have time to mess about with all that, exchanging business all day for the $40-50 I may make doing this.  Its simply not worth my time messing about to make sure I get all the trades done at a decent rate or leave coins until the rates go up again.  For the $3-4 diference this may make to my daily "earnings", it is not worth my time.   But if a pool can get me an average return somewhere near the $40-50 I can make doing it manually, then they can have their 3% or whatever it is for doing this.

If the pool returns me only 50% of the $40-50 a day then although its still chump change, why should I contnue to support such a pool if it isn't working properly?

Im new to this coin mining thing as a bit of fun really. If it makes me enough for a couple of beers on Friday night then fine. If it ends up with me selling the 7990's on ebay, and making a loss, oh well - worth a gamble.  Doesn't mean that I want to bend over and take it from a pool that clearly isnt using my hardware to the best of its ability.

Ive only got a lowly 2800Khs.  I see some on a few of these pools that have 60-70,000Khs, thats  20x what I have.  If Im being shortchanged by this pool for $20 a day, these people are missing out on $400 a day. Not funny at all.

[Shaban]

What I've noticed that is most effecting payouts is this:

When I first started mining with hashcows, I was seeing payouts (per round) between .001-.009 (sometimes more, but not very often)... now I'm getting between .00006 and .0005. What caused this huge difference? I was never seeing 4 zero's after the decimal, now half the rounds are. And I've only been here for 2 weeks now.

[aTriz]

All of you who are clearly upset with the payouts over the last few days let me clearly put everything out in the open on what is going on right now.

1. There has been recently a huge increase in hash power across the board for most coins, this is return makes the profitability of the coin's go down because of course the difficulty goes up.
2. The price of coins that we are farming haven't really gone up enough to combat these lower profits due to the increase in difficulty.
3. Stratum issues causing the stratum to get stuck on some switches. (the first two days the pool was down for a toal of 6 hours)
4. Our pool even with the stated issues above, has been on par with the other multipools, so it's not just our pool that is experiencing low payouts.
5. Just because you go to coinchoose/coinwarz and say "oh look I can make X amount in 24 hours mining this, it's so much better than hashcows!" That is not the case, there is too many factors to figure into it, price of the coin, difficulty changes, rejects, liquidity, etc. A perfect example would be a person that was in IRC just yesterday stated he tried to mine GDC for 24 hours, it resulted in him getting 1/3 of the payout stated on these sites.

What we can do is continue to work on and fix issues with coin-switching/stratum which we should have completed in 24/48 hours. Once this is complete we will take a look at each coin and evaluate the performance and then will add coins that need to be on the pool.

I would confidently say with us re-working the entire coin switching process and a re-evaluation of each coin and of course the addition of a few coins it will help us to continue to bring you a better return. Though with all that said, there is not much we can do to control the markets, and ultimately that has an affect on your payout.

Nearmiss or I will update everyone here the second we get some results from coin-switching/stratum testing.




 

[C3ALL]

1. There has been recently a huge increase in hash power across the board for most coins, this is return makes the profitability of the coin's go down because of course the difficulty goes up.
2. The price of coins that we are farming haven't really gone up enough to combat these lower profits due to the increase in difficulty.

Im not comparing payouts from a few weeks ago to today, I only started mining a week ago to see what al the fuss is about.  On hascows Im getting sometimes up to 25% rejects.  Mining one coin directly Ive had 24 hours at near zero.

Regarding the payouts, if I mine say WDC for 24 hours on a dedicated WDC pool, then convert to BTC on cryptsy on auto trades (no waiting to cash in on the best rate etc), I can make almost 30% more than mining on hashcows for 24 hours.  This should not be possible if the haschows pool did what it is supposed to do.

The difficulty has gone up on all coins, correct, but it had already gone up when I started mining just a week ago.  There is a review a couple of pages back by a guy that has mined for a while, and he has come to the same conclusion, that mining on hashcows is making much less than just doing it on one solo coin and switching yourself. If Im going to be donating a percetage to keep the system working, then it should be, well... working.

4. Our pool even with the stated issues above, has been on par with the other multipools, so it's not just our pool that is experiencing low payouts.

We wil see.  Ive switched to middlecoin and from calculations so far on just a couple of hours, the payout seems a lot better.  will report back once Ive compared like for like 24 hour periods.  If I had 2 machines I would set them mining one on each and do a like for like.  Perhaps somebody that has two equal machines can do this test and prove the payout is the same across this pool and others?

5. Just because you go to coinchoose/coinwarz and say "oh look I can make X amount in 24 hours mining this, it's so much better than hashcows!" That is not the case, there is too many factors to figure into it, price of the coin, difficulty changes, rejects, liquidity, etc. A perfect example would be a person that was in IRC just yesterday stated he tried to mine GDC for 24 hours, it resulted in him getting 1/3 of the payout stated on these sites.

Correct, mining a single coin will not always result in the payout you expect, but when I spent 24 hours making my own switches (eaving it on WDC as a stable one when I slept) I made it to 0.041BTC in 24 hours.  Mining on your pool I make 0.02.  SOmething is clearly wrong with that.  I hope its server issues and nothing more sinister.

Why quote a profit per MH/s average on your site if the true results are absolutely nowhere near it?  The cynic in me would suggest that has been done to attract more people to the pool and therefore gain more commission from the increased has rate. Its a bit unfair if those quotes are misleading though.

As I say, Im on middlecoin for a couple of days and Ill compare against returns from hashcows and see which is best for myself.  Others are free to make thir own choice.

[2RoyalSox]

Good to see that the cows are working on the issue...I've unfortunately have had to redirect my primary pool to middle coin for the time being. Though I have every intention of coming back to you guys once the connectivity issues are resolved

[aTriz]

Im not comparing payouts from a few weeks ago to today, I only started mining a week ago to see what al the fuss is about.  On hascows Im getting sometimes up to 25% rejects.  Mining one coin directly Ive had 24 hours at near zero.

Regarding the payouts, if I mine say WDC for 24 hours on a dedicated WDC pool, then convert to BTC on cryptsy on auto trades (no waiting to cash in on the best rate etc), I can make almost 30% more than mining on hashcows for 24 hours.  This should not be possible if the haschows pool did what it is supposed to do.

The difficulty has gone up on all coins, correct, but it had already gone up when I started mining just a week ago.  There is a review a couple of pages back by a guy that has mined for a while, and he has come to the same conclusion, that mining on hashcows is making much less than just doing it on one solo coin and switching yourself. If Im going to be donating a percetage to keep the system working, then it should be, well... working.

Rejects are normal when mining coins with much faster block targets, it's calculated into our formula's when selecting coins and the fact that we are switching coins factors in, of course you will see less rejects mining one coin especially when that coin has a slower block target/steady hashrate.

You might be right over the last few days while the pool has encountered some issues. We have been straight forward with everyone here we have told people we are dealing with issues and fixing them, with that being said, I would love for you to find a pool that has a community and customer service like ours.

We wil see.  Ive switched to middlecoin and from calculations so far on just a couple of hours, the payout seems a lot better.  will report back once Ive compared like for like 24 hour periods.  If I had 2 machines I would set them mining one on each and do a like for like.  Perhaps somebody that has two equal machines can do this test and prove the payout is the same across this pool and others?

Like you said in the last half of you're response, you are comparing apples to oranges, if you want to compare you would have to take at least a week of payouts from both pools at the same time with equal hashrates and with both pools running correctly.

Correct, mining a single coin will not always result in the payout you expect, but when I spent 24 hours making my own switches (eaving it on WDC as a stable one when I slept) I made it to 0.041BTC in 24 hours.  Mining on your pool I make 0.02.  SOmething is clearly wrong with that.  I hope its server issues and nothing more sinister.

Why quote a profit per MH/s average on your site if the true results are absolutely nowhere near it?  The cynic in me would suggest that has been done to attract more people to the pool and therefore gain more commission from the increased has rate. Its a bit unfair if those quotes are misleading though.

As I say, Im on middlecoin for a couple of days and Ill compare against returns from hashcows and see which is best for myself.  Others are free to make thir own choice.

The problem is a lot of the people who mine here and on middlecoin do not have the time to make switches on their self and many don't want to be bothered trading the coins.

We quote a mh/avg and the true results are nowhere near it? That is quite a false accusation, as stated on our graphs, * Please note, the data above is a somewhat small sample size taken from miners known to have mined 24/7 and auto-exchanged 100% of coins. Your results may vary slightly based on reject rate or receiving non-btc for some coins ect.

From what you have said you have been mining here for 24 hours, hope you do realize there are un-exchanged rounds that carry over from previous days which will make you're payout different from others.

I hope you do well on middlecoin and maybe when we get things sorted out I hope you give us another try as we have been historically paid out pretty darn well for our miners.

[aTriz]

Good to see that the cows are working on the issue...I've unfortunately have had to redirect my primary pool to middle coin for the time being. Though I have every intention of coming back to you guys once the connectivity issues are resolved

Understood, we appreciate you giving us the opportunity to earn back your hash

Moo

[logicsol]

A big part of the current concern is that the numbers just seem so far off.

Here is what I see today.

5379   DGC   00:23:51   4   60           0      0   0.000013 BTC
5378   ANC   01:06:05   31   156.42    0      0   0.000011 BTC

I had one of my rigs down for maintenance, so I was only seeing about 350 K/H, however there is no way I should have gotten less btc for my share of 156.42 ANC than I did for 60 DGC.

156.2 ANC is worth aprox 1.1 BTC
60 DGC is worth .045 BTC

I got .001% of the BTC value of the ANC while providing .02% of the pools hashrate.
I got .028% of the BTC value of the DGC while providing the same .02% of the pool hashrate.

The DGC payout seems about right, however the ANC amount is off by an order of magnitude x2.

[jerrybusey]

5. Just because you go to coinchoose/coinwarz and say "oh look I can make X amount in 24 hours mining this, it's so much better than hashcows!" That is not the case, there is too many factors to figure into it, price of the coin, difficulty changes, rejects, liquidity, etc. A perfect example would be a person that was in IRC just yesterday stated he tried to mine GDC for 24 hours, it resulted in him getting 1/3 of the payout stated on these sites.
 

I always wondered why this site didn't mine coin x  when it showed as being so profitable on coinchoose/coinwarz so I put together some tools, gathered some data via various public APIs, and did some experiments. My conclusion is that this site generally does a pretty good job given its hashpower and the general constraints of operating an autoswitching multipool. My other conclusion is that for any coin that isn't stable and high difficulty (and some other things)-- which means the most profitable coins for hopping-- coinchoose/coinwarz suck somewhere between moderately and horribly. At this point I'm toying with the idea of making a more accurate competitor to them that would include much more sophisticated (and hopefully accurate) models of actual coin output, particularly for the edge cases. We'll see.

I don't think the point of this pool is to make a better return than can be had through very careful and well researched handling of hashing power. I think it's point is to generally yield a better return from unattended mining than could be had from leaving your miners on a single coin for extended periods. This pool has generally done that.

What we can do is continue to work on and fix issues with coin-switching/stratum which we should have completed in 24/48 hours. Once this is complete we will take a look at each coin and evaluate the performance and then will add coins that need to be on the pool.

I would confidently say with us re-working the entire coin switching process and a re-evaluation of each coin and of course the addition of a few coins it will help us to continue to bring you a better return. Though with all that said, there is not much we can do to control the markets, and ultimately that has an affect on your payout.

Nearmiss or I will update everyone here the second we get some results from coin-switching/stratum testing.

My stratum issues seem to be worse over the past few weeks. I notice the average hash on this site has doubled or trippled over that same period. If increased load is contributing to the problem you should consider temporarily limiting new registration until the problem is resolved. I've noticed some other pools doing the same for short periods since the onslaught began.

Also, please bring back TAG. Sure everyone will bitch about the long maturity time (myself included) but it has nice parameters and has had some decent periods performing better than this pool's base/soft period coins (WDC/ANC).

[captainbluff]

There is obviously an issue here, ever since the "My Estimated Earnings" showed zero starting last week, the pool has not been the same.

I hear my GPU fans throttle down on all my rigs and when I check them, sure enough they all have disconnected from hascow and failed over to back up pools.

Admins please give us an update on when will this be fixed

[StephenP]

tonight's payout shaping up to be the lowest over the past week or so.

[jedimstr]

Assuming Hashcows is seeing the same issues as Middlecoin right now with backed up unexchanged coins due to Cryptsy issues?   

Apparently the Crypsty admin is at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas and hasn't been around to fix the Cryptsy exchange. Or, he's letting it all ride on red at the Roulette table.

[int3ractivodular]

Unfortunately I've had to point my hashpower elsewhere til these connection issues are fixed. Looking forward to coming back though, hashcows is definitely my favorite profit switching pool 

[StephenP]

Where did you point your miners for the time being? Aside from straight up LTC mining, every other pool seems to be broken in some way due to the influx of miners. I used to love Coinex, but it's almost totally broken at the moment too.

[int3ractivodular]

Where did you point your miners for the time being? Aside from straight up LTC mining, every other pool seems to be broken in some way due to the influx of miners. I used to love Coinex, but it's almost totally broken at the moment too.

I've gone back to mining Applecoin because for some reason people are paying absurdly high amounts for them.

Other than that I had my cgminer load balanced between the blocks factory WDC pool, middlecoin, and liteguardian's PPS LTC pool.

[ozoner]

Ok guys, definitely, 100% there exist problems with "my estimated earnings" still...  And yes I am exchanging for BTC...

5409   WDC   00:29:47   10   556.4   0   0   0.000072 BTC
...
5407   WDC   00:10:02   4   222.6   0   0   0.000069 BTC
...
5405   WDC   00:40:07   21   1175   0   0   0.000069 BTC

That's simply not possible.

Not complaining, just error reporting.

Thanks.

[kb24mvp]

pool down again?.....

edit...few mins and was back up

[matauc12]

To the 2 above posters, this issue has been discussed for the last 10 pages. It's getting fixed within 24-48hours as of 6-8 hours ago.

[ozoner]

To the 2 above posters, this issue has been discussed for the last 10 pages. It's getting fixed within 24-48hours as of 6-8 hours ago.

Actually, last the admins posted, they thought they'd fixed the issue I was outlining.