7Gh/s ... NMC or BTC ... or BTC pool hopping?

[marvinmartian]

Ok, I'll wait a few days and re-post my question in (hopefully) a more hijack proof manner.

I was mainly curious about which would be most profitable:  BTC mining, NMC mining, or BTC pool hopping.

Seems like the latter is the winner but I'm still somewhat at a loss as to how it's done best.  I mean, if I just rotate my miners every 10 minutes or something I'm not clear on how that improves my profit.

I think my lack of understanding is specific to how "shares" are translated into BTCs on various pools.  I know Slush's pool uses a score based mechanism that discourages hopping.  But "straight up" share based mechanisms (like Deepbit, BTC Guild, etc...) seem as though hopping would net you no real gain.  My thinking is that when you hop, you get a proportionately smaller share. 

So I'm not clear on how your "hopped" shares from differ from the sum total you'd normally get by staying with one pool.

[pennytrader]

YOu need to read a paper on why mining to the 47% CDF point is optimal (the number could be wrong but it should be close).

You can't do that with BTCguild or slush because their stats are delayed.

[grod]

There is a program which simply re-directs your miners to the pool most likely to yield the highest per-share return.  It's that easy -- track down that proxy and run your miners against it.

You don't round robin, you join the pool working on the freshest block.  The math behind Raulo's Pool Hopping Exploit seems easy enough, but clearly I failed to comprehend it correctly.   I am willing to trust empirical results observed by those running it however, and reported values are consistently 10% over expected payout at a minimum (that's why I used that number in my OP).

[marvinmartian]

YOu need to read a paper on why mining to the 47% CDF point is optimal (the number could be wrong but it should be close).

You can't do that with BTCguild or slush because their stats are delayed.

Been trying to Google and am not coming up with much.

[Sukrim]

You search for this one here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3165.0

And you dont mine to 43/47/??% CDF but until 43.5% of the current difficulty (43.5% of ~1.6 million) difficulty1 shares have been mined. If pools switched to diff2 shares, you would need to hop at 21.75% etc.

There is a constantly maintained and (very) fast evolving pool hopping proxy program available just 3 clicks from this thread. all you then need to do is enter your own worker data there, run the proxy and point your miners to the PC that runs the proxy. No other manual intervention needed (other than constantly updating the proxy, as pool operators don't put any terms on their page - but seem to like to "fight" pool hopping as "illegal/unwanted/against TOS").

In this sense pool hopping has also a real risk of loosing BTC due to getting banned/cheated by pool operators

[tman540]

You should join my pool (info in sig). Tripleminig has weekly jackpots of 1.5 BTC and pool hoppers can't take shares from the pool (recent upgrade)

[marvinmartian]

You search for this one here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=3165.0

And you dont mine to 43/47/??% CDF but until 43.5% of the current difficulty (43.5% of ~1.6 million) difficulty1 shares have been mined. If pools switched to diff2 shares, you would need to hop at 21.75% etc.

There is a constantly maintained and (very) fast evolving pool hopping proxy program available just 3 clicks from this thread. all you then need to do is enter your own worker data there, run the proxy and point your miners to the PC that runs the proxy. No other manual intervention needed (other than constantly updating the proxy, as pool operators don't put any terms on their page - but seem to like to "fight" pool hopping as "illegal/unwanted/against TOS").

In this sense pool hopping has also a real risk of loosing BTC due to getting banned/cheated by pool operators

Thanks.  I'm trying to mull over the pros/cons of pool hopping.  The morality argument smacks (to me) of youth.  If anyone can pool hop, then it doesn't seem immoral since the opportunity is there for everyone.  Similarly, if more people hopping would make hopping less profitable, then even more so.

It's like saying you're "cheating" by driving your car more efficiently than its EPA MPG rating.  Technically, you're cheating the oil companies, who like it or not DO influence Washington when it comes to MPG legislation.  So by driving your car more efficiently, you're hurting the oil companies who then have to raise the price of oil, which hurts everyone.  Pretty ridiculous argument, no?  Logically equivalent though.

Good for people (especially young folks) to be *thinking* about morality though.  Shows it's not totally dead.  So I'm not gonna rail on them for it.

[Sukrim]

You should join my pool (info in sig). Tripleminig has weekly jackpots of 1.5 BTC and pool hoppers can't take shares from the pool (recent upgrade)

All in all you loose at least 1% if you don't do refspamming and the chance to get teh jackpot is also not that high - so a serious miner is far better off with a 0% pool.

[talldude]

Thanks.  I'm trying to mull over the pros/cons of pool hopping.  The morality argument smacks (to me) of youth.  If anyone can pool hop, then it doesn't seem immoral since the opportunity is there for everyone.  Similarly, if more people hopping would make hopping less profitable, then even more so.

It's like saying you're "cheating" by driving your car more efficiently than its EPA MPG rating.  Technically, you're cheating the oil companies, who like it or not DO influence Washington when it comes to MPG legislation.  So by driving your car more efficiently, you're hurting the oil companies who then have to raise the price of oil, which hurts everyone.  Pretty ridiculous argument, no?  Logically equivalent though.

Good for people (especially young folks) to be *thinking* about morality though.  Shows it's not totally dead.  So I'm not gonna rail on them for it.

It's more like cutting in line - if the line ain't moving fast enough, just skip a few people...

But I think this should be addressed by pool operators if they don't like it. If there are pools that allow it, they're victimizing themselves because it's easy enough to make unprofitable.

You're going to get the highest payout from hopping. Just think about it in a 2 pool world with no other operators. So pool A and B both start mining and you join pool A. After 10 mins, pool B finds a block. Now, all the work you've done for A is basically useless (new block = new work). So if you switch to pool B, you have the same likelihood of finding a block as you would in pool A, but you also get paid for the previous work you did for pool A even though it is of no use in finding the current block.

Basically, you get paid extra if you mine in the "freshest" pool.

[xontol212]

It's extra effort, relative analysis and development to shoot at miners and forget about them. This is no more stealing than switching from BTC to mining namecoin during the subsidized period. You know, jumping pools are cheating, simple and simple. You stole from honest miners who participated in the pools.