Questionable hashcow mining choice

[fablkak]

I joined Hashcow yesterday and I have noticed that they tend to mine relatively profitable coins but rarely the most profitable coin. For example, at the time I'm writing this post according to: www.coinwarz.com Grandcoins are making about $40 per Mhash per day while the current choice for hashcow is actually ANC which is ranked 14th on the same site, making around $15 per Mhash per day. Obviously the discrepancy is massive and I even see that Grandcoin are on the list payout options so I would assume this means that they can also mine them. Why not switch to Grandcoins or some other alt? Could they be using everyone's hash rate to mine the 1st on the list and pay everyone in BTC equivalent to the 14th on the profitability chart? I'm not accusing them at this stage, they seem like they are running a really good site it just baffles me why they would choose to mine something so far down on the profitability index.
Perhaps someone non noob can relay this question to them over at: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=293872.480

Maybe they have a good explanation, maybe the short difficulty adjust of grandcoin makes it unfeasible but that doesn't explain the other 12 possibilities.

Come to think of it, if they were mining something other than what they were claiming then the hashrate history of that coin would show it. I would imagine that someone somewhere has tracked whether or not coin hashrate changes correspond to coin jumps.

Any explanations would be welcome.

[titulng]

LOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooOL

[fablkak]

Thank you for your well thought out, informative and flawlessly articulated reply.
(just looked up his account, he has 9 posts and that was his longest... Obvious troll account is obvious)

[kalus]

i am mining on hashcows (lol can't post urls?), and there have been some strange happenings with earnings reports over the past day or 2.

i'm just starting out, so i guess i'll try a few pools.  It is sort of like dating.  i think if/when hashcows (lol can't post urls!) works, it is a good mining pool.  

by good, i mean the payouts and auto-trades seem above board, when the trackers are working.  last 2 days i've avoided using hashcows because of the troubles with their API/scripts whatever runs the displays. 

[fablkak]

Yeah, I have been reading the main forum post on it and it seems as though they are having some trouble with estimated earnings being incorrect and they are trying to sort it out. What concerns me is simply their clearly sub-optimal choice of coin. I would be happy if some kind of explanation was given as to why they tend to around the middle of the profitability chart as opposed to somewhere in the top 5. Being the kind of suspicious person that I am I would naturally assume they are doing it to make extra money as it would be easy to mine something very profitable and pay everyone out at a lower rate however as my OP stated it's probably easy to check hashrate history and debunk this.

What factors go into the choice of a coin?
From their webiste
"We decide which coin to mine based on its profitability in relation to mining Bitcoin directly. The profitability is expressed as a multiple of Bitcoin, assuming Bitcoin had a profitability of 1.0. Example: A profitability value of 2.5 means a coin is 2.5x more profitable to mine that Bitcoin. The calculations for this value are all fairly standard. We do take orphan/stale rates of certain coins into account, applying an 'orphan rate' penalty to a coins final profitability number before using it"


If that were the only criteria then why don't they mine more grandcoin?
Is there some restriction because their pool is so large it might constitute a 51% attack? TBH I'm new and I don't even know what that is exactly, is that when you mine at 51% of the network hashrate and get 100% of the blocks? Or is it something people do to try and induce block forks?

[cuesta]

Read the hashcows thread....They have tried a lot of coins and the most profitable don't behave well for various reasons when they throw the whole pool hash rate at them.  I'm happy trusting them, the payouts I've had are well worth the non-hassle and risk of trying to keep up with a coin rating site. Also check out coinchoose, dustcoin, coinwarz....they all rate coins differently..

[fablkak]

Read the hashcows thread....They have tried a lot of coins and the most profitable don't behave well for various reasons when they throw the whole pool hash rate at them.  I'm happy trusting them, the payouts I've had are well worth the non-hassle and risk of trying to keep up with a coin rating site. Also check out coinchoose, dustcoin, coinwarz....they all rate coins differently..

Fair enough.
Judging by all of their posts in their official forum thread they don't give the impression that they are up to anything sus. I'm experiencing relatively low earnings with them at the moment but this is probably just a short term fluctuation. I'll mine with them for another 24 hours before I start looking elsewhere.

Off topic I know, but has anyone found a decent grandcoin mining pool? One that they have used and know to be fair?