Mining Altcoins vs. BTC

[aliasme]

Hey all-

I have noticed that a lot of times if you chase the top alt-coins in terms of profitability from lists such as coinwarz, dustcoin, choosecoin you end up mining coins that may be technically more efficient than Bitcoin due to a recent difficulty drop, or spike in price on one of the exchanges. The problem though is by the time you are done mining and have accumulated enough coins to sell, you have lost the market opportunity.  You can also run into the problem of getting less GH/s due to latency with a small alt-coin pool compared to the load and speed of a large site.  In the end, I have found it better to set it and forget it and keep the miner pointed at a large Bitcoin pool.  Just thought I'd share, because the enticement of altcoins may be a fallacy for people looking to optimize.

[eightcylinders]

I was thinking the same thing.  Thank you for sharing .. sticking with bitcoin pools.

[jonanon]

It's a good point however I find mining alts to be more profitable - stick to some of the major alts instead of the minor ones 

[One Coin]

It's a good point however I find mining alts to be more profitable - stick to some of the major alts instead of the minor ones 

Yeah, that's true but on Coin Warz they have've got "Exchange Rate Stability", so that can help to decide wich coin to mine.

[Lethn]

It's all about the long term and taking advantage of price swings, if you can spot a good altcoin then you can and will make more money from it than you would just mining Bitcoin but there's always that risk vs reward thing where you've got to decide whether it's worth it or not.

People laughed at Worldcoin back when it was 0.00003500 BTC or something but now it's risen to what it is now everybody wants to hop onto it to see it go up further and the great thing is about altcoin all your profit is in BTC so there's no need to worry about your money getting devalued like the dollar so I guess it all just depends on how risk averse you are. This is why though I would always advise you do mining for fun as a hobby and never for a profession, I suspect that all these mining companies that are going up now will be in the red or struggling a lot by the end of the year because the only way they'll be able to make money regularly is by charging a premium for the hashpower they share with people like CEX.IO.