@ curious guy.
Hi.
A good place to start is
www.coinwarz.com. They have a large list of coins and when you click on one, it will provide you the block reward, block time, current market price of the coin and other information. I just use the block reward and block time to find out how many total coins are produced in one day. A lot of coins are like Bitcoin and the reward per block decreases over time, but some have a variable rate. So you might have a block reward of 10 coins between blocks 1 and 1,000 and then 15 coins between blocks 1001 and 2000.
In order to verify the accuracy of the information on coinwarz a lot of times I google the coin name and find the official site which is usually coinname.org or the official post about the coins launch and there I can double check the block reward, block time etc...I have found some inaccuracies but it's usually because the block reward has gone down and coinwarz has not updated their info. In these cases, the coins usually turn out to be less profitable than if you used the coinwarz info.
Another similar site is whattomine.com. It has similar info as coinwarz.
The network hashrates listed on these sites are pretty accurate and it helps a lot to look at the historical progression. Real time data on network hashrates of smaller coins can shift more than you might see with Bitcoin because there's a whole market of miners out there chasing the most profitable coins.
A final note is on coin prices. I have been very generous in my calculations by assuming you can sell all the coins at the current buy price. This is almost inevitably never the case. The smaller coin markets have very low volume and not much liquidity. So if you came in with a large number of coins and wanted to offload them on the market, you're going to drive the price down and end up getting less. If you entered a limit order with your desired price, you could end up waiting days to sell even a Bitcoin or two worth of coins. So to be really accurate, you'd have to look at how many coins you can actually sell at the desired price and how quickly and how often you need to do so.
