How do you diversify your mining portfolio?

[DigitalFarns]

I am anxiously awaiting powering up my first small mining rig in a couple of days. It's a small 3 card rig for me to cut my teeth on and learn the mechanics of mining before I start to build more rigs and expand. 

This rig is setup to mine at Nicehash presently, but I'm thinking I might run it there for a couple weeks, and then run it somewhere else for a couple weeks, and so on, trying to learn the various popular platforms. 

I'm curious what some of you might be doing in order to diversify your mining efforts.  I've read messages about pools going offline for periods of time, or other issues putting a halt to your mining efforts.  If all eggs are in one basket and something like that happens, then all revenues are stopped momentarily.

I think I might want to split my efforts as I grow my "garden" (too small to be called a farm LOL) into 3 or 4 equal shares.  What would you recommend?  My thoughts were:

• 25% on Nicehash - which as I understand, you're not mining a specific coin, but selling your hashing power and paid in BTC - is this accurate?
• 25% on a platform similar to Nicehash, for the sake of being on a separate but similar platform. I feel like I've seen some mentioned here, but I can't say for sure.  Are there other platforms like Nicehash?
• 25% on a strong ETH pool, to mine ETH directly and HODL.  Any pool recommendations?
• 25% mining something else that's in infant stage that has potential to grow?  I don't know if DOGE would fall into this category or not, but I see many of you talking about mining DOGE.  Or perhaps this 25% gets subset itself into 3 or 4 specific coins, for the sake purely of mining and HODLing.

My approach to all of this will be primarily mine and HODL, minus some cash flowing out to pay utilities and invest in more hardware. 

[miner29]

Not sure why you would do all this instead of figuring out what is the most profitable coin for you to mine and then just stick it all on a pool.  This isnt like trading....this is mining.

[DigitalFarns]

Fair enough. Perhaps I am looking at it through an investing lens, as it's the world that I'm familiar with.  If it makes better sense to lump it all together and focus on one coin, then I can do that instead.  I've just always liked the inherent protection of diversification, so that's how I've been thinking about this.  So with the all-in-one approach, do you periodically re-evaluate the coins and change pools as the numbers go up and down, and if so, how frequently do you typically re-evaluate those numbers? 

[miner29]

Pools if properly functioning (ie able to hit blocks) will very much equal out over time.  The key is to find one you like and have reasonable connection speed.  What coins you mine will depend on your hardware and what coins you may want to mine and hodl if you think they will go up.  Best to speculate early on a coin then later.

It may surprise you how much hardware and time and effort it take to mine a decent amount of coins.  Mining is best done when prices are low.....when prices are up like now..its best for miners who have been building up bags to cash some out. 

Mining is more of a marathon. 

[DigitalFarns]

Thank you for the additional insight.  I do understand the marathon tactic.  I'm looking at this as a way into adding more to what would be my retirement in 20 years, I've started very late in life thinking about that.  And I'm well aware that I'm not picking the best time to get started LOL.  I'm just trying to learn what I can right now, before getting to crazy on investing into hardware, the little rig I bought is just a small 70MHs unit, but hoping to learn and grow significantly from there, even if that means that growing doesn't start but months from now if things have settled down a bit.

[Temido2222]

Just mine what's most profitable on whattomine and then trade that for Doge/BTC/whatever. There also isn't too much you need to know with mining. Once you get the hang of stuff, it's mostly set and forget, aside from diagnosing crashes if they happen, dialing in overclocks, and updating miners

[Metroid]

ehhe, you don't diversify mining portfolio, you just mine the coin with the highest demand at moment and then you sell and buy the coin you want.

[adaseb]

There aren't many options these days. Your limitation is based on your hardware pretty much.

If you got a GPU with >4GB then you mine ETH. Nothing else is profitable.
If you got a CPU you mine XMR. Nothing else is profitable.
If you got a BTC ASIC, you mine BTC. You can try BCH however profitability is almost always equal.

That's pretty much it. Back in 2014 you could mine LTC, Darkcoin, DOGE, Maxcoin, etc and spread it out with your GPUs. But times have changed.

[mak013]

The only diversification is mining another coin. The best way to maximize your profit is to test several top pools with the same hash, after that choose one of them for mining. Or you can mine Nicehash if you want to get BTC.
And i think that the time of shitcoins left in 2017.

[Maxstl007]

OP try to worry more about what your mining rigs and gpus will be outputting rather than the difference between pools, it's still going to give you same results, it's better to learn how you can get a better hashrate from a gpu, 30mhs for example will remain 30mhs on other pools, spend your time with bios modding, mining tools and overclocking/downclocking

[DigitalFarns]

Gotcha.  Thank you all for setting me straight on this.  I do tend to overthink things and it seems I was doing that here!  :-)

[Sourhearrt]

You are confusing yourself with trading or staking with mining, this is different, whatever hashrate that your mining rig out put is what will determine your returns, if your rigs output 100mhs it will remain the same on other pools too

[Eco_111]

Your topic says it's all, there is nothing to diversify when it comes to mining, you only need to invest on mining rigs is all, it's your mining rigs that will pay you back your ROI and mining returns are calculated base on your mining rig capability, presently Ethereum is the most profitable coin to mine, if you mine other coins your returns will be lower

[mak013]

Your topic says it's all, there is nothing to diversify when it comes to mining, you only need to invest on mining rigs is all, it's your mining rigs that will pay you back your ROI and mining returns are calculated base on your mining rig capability, presently Ethereum is the most profitable coin to mine, if you mine other coins your returns will be lower

Don`t say it so categorically. Mining with small part of rigs some shitcoins can give you huge profit. Or you can mine some perspective coin and hold it. You are  losing some profit in present but get perspective coin for future.