The downside of using Nicehash and the likes of it.

[mikeywith]

NiceHash will brag about paying 6% more fees when that happens, but won't tell you when they pay you 34% LESS than what normal BTC pools pay.

Obviously, today's fees were pretty high, with some block fees netting nearly the same as the block reward itself, an example of that would block 788685 that had 6.13 BTC in fee rewards alone, that's nearly 100% more profit for that single block.

Current earning for the average large PPLNS pool and most PPS pools is nearly $140 per 1 PH (keeping the figures in fiat for easier comparison for the readers), while if your miner is pointed to nicehash AsicBoost or None-AB you would be making 104$, and 92$ respectively, that's a loss of 26% or 34%.



It's worth mentioning that this could last for a few hours only, it could last for a few days, maybe weeks, nobody knows, which applies for the other side of the equation, when NiceHash is pays 6% or 10%, it doesn't mean it has to last forever, in many cases those payouts last no longer than a few hours, so while you could make more BTC by giving your hashrate to Nicehash, in times like these, you could be loosing more.

I am not here to bash Nicehash or the other services that have the same business model (NH doesn't need more bashing IMO anyway), but this topic was made to make people aware that the way some of those services advertise their services couldn't be further from the truth, that brag-post of "we are paying 6% more" shouldn't be there because it gives the assumption that this is what they always pay, which is wrong, I would have the utmost respect for Nicehash if they would post another topic today and say "We are paying 26-34% less", but we all know they won't do that.

[1714637705]

1714637705

[paid2]

I don't like Nicehash and the team behind it very much.

They do a great job for me, they pay their miners well (overall), and allow those who want to rent hashrate to be able to do so and try their luck solo with abilities they don't physically own. Good point for them.

However, they are currently losing their way in the race for profits.
Their "EasyMining" package is a scam, they charge people for hashrate rental packages at exorbitant prices, you see the auctions for these packages and the prices per Eh/s are sometimes  up to 4 BTC. Which is ridiculous when the average price is (last time I did the comparison but it fluctuates all the time) 2.97 BTC per Eh/s at this exact time.

The worst thing is that when you buy one of their packs, they show you a graph with your luck, even with 5 minutes of mining with only a few Ph/s, you will still have a bestshare of x T according to them. ALWAYS. They cheat and lie, generate potentially addictive behaviour by faking the information given to beginners, and this is worthy of contempt.

Also, they stole their Team Mining concept from Willi, and are getting fat with fees on it. (without asking him anything)

So on the one hand they pay their miners correctly. On the other hand, this is possible because they are screwing their customers who rent hashrate.
I find this borderline, and I personally don't want to support this abuse, even for 6% more from time to time.

[philipma1957]

I don't like Nicehash and the team behind it very much.

They do a great job for me, they pay their miners well (overall), and allow those who want to rent hashrate to be able to do so and try their luck solo with abilities they don't physically own. Good point for them.

However, they are currently losing their way in the race for profits.
Their "EasyMining" package is a scam, they charge people for hashrate rental packages at exorbitant prices, you see the auctions for these packages and the prices per Eh/s are sometimes  up to 4 BTC. Which is ridiculous when the average price is (last time I did the comparison but it fluctuates all the time) 2.97 BTC per Eh/s at this exact time.

The worst thing is that when you buy one of their packs, they show you a graph with your luck, even with 5 minutes of mining with only a few Ph/s, you will still have a bestshare of x T according to them. ALWAYS. They cheat and lie, generate potentially addictive behaviour by faking the information given to beginners, and this is worthy of contempt.

Also, they stole their Team Mining concept from Willi, and are getting fat with fees on it. (without asking him anything)

So on the one hand they pay their miners correctly. On the other hand, this is possible because they are screwing their customers who rent hashrate.
I find this borderline, and I personally don't want to support this abuse, even for 6% more from time to time.

Willi borrowed team mining concept from me. Made an improved version of what I used to do.

and ck made his solopool because I begged him to do it for at least a year. I then pushed team mining to support it and hit some decent blocks 3 I think

I begged bitminter he refused to it and he went out of business.

Nicehash is meh I do not use them much but they serve a purpose. They help to turn shit coins into btc.

[WayneBunbury]

not to bash any pool service but each have thare pro-side and con-side  but basicaly deppending on the service example nicehash basicaly resells hashpower wile renting haspower tham selfs as for fees i think the fees go tawords thare bills   i remember back in the day befor pool mining became a thing everything was solo it wasnt till sirten coins become populer (price wise ie big proicce) thay every man and his dog mind it witch inturn cortsed the blockchain to exspasnd do note that the orignal bitcoin mempool cannot be more than  1mb but you get the jest of things

[DaveF]

....They help to turn shit coins into btc.

Following up with that thought, it is why they are my failover pool for all my equipment.

Main Bitcoin pool goes down or for whatever reason my miners can't connect to it it goes to the secondary pool which is nicehash.
A script miner can't connect to either of my primary LTC pools, it fails over to nicehash.

Same with just about every other rig I have any place mining any algorithm.

And in the end, it all gets converted to BTC without any intervention from me. Could I be generating more here and there with better failover management and sending it to pools with lower fees? Possibly.
Would it ever amount to enough to be worth the time and effort to go through all that hassle? Never.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

....They help to turn shit coins into btc.

Following up with that thought, it is why they are my failover pool for all my equipment.

Main Bitcoin pool goes down or for whatever reason my miners can't connect to it it goes to the secondary pool which is nicehash.
A script miner can't connect to either of my primary LTC pools, it fails over to nicehash.

Same with just about every other rig I have any place mining any algorithm.

And in the end, it all gets converted to BTC without any intervention from me. Could I be generating more here and there with better failover management and sending it to pools with lower fees? Possibly.
Would it ever amount to enough to be worth the time and effort to go through all that hassle? Never.

-Dave

Saves time bigly.

[kano]

Sounds like all these big pools are damn unreliable if you need to worry about failover ...

[DaveF]

Sounds like all these big pools are damn unreliable if you need to worry about failover ...

Could be worse, you could be mining at a pool that has not found a block in over a year and a 1/2

But seriously, BGP routing swaps, misc firewall issues, DNS issues, and so on. Anything can lead to a few seconds or a minute where you can't reach something.
Your LA node is at Vultr, they have scheduled maintenance this weekend. There *should* be no disruption, but if there is do you want my miner to idle for 5 minutes waiting for things to come back or go someplace else and check back in a minute or 2.

The just use another location does not help since if it is you then it just wastes more time till it hits the next fail over.

Even if it's a few hashes here and there why let a miner sit idle?

That is actually where places like NH do work well, as was pointed out no matter what you mine, if there is an issue at your primary pool you can have them as #2 and just get paid in BTC.

Shrug, just took a look, the last time the BTC miners flopped over was between 3 weeks and 5 months depending on their location. The LTC all have been steady since Feb 9th when I did a thing.

The shit coin miners are all over the place. Shocker.....not.

-Dave

[hZti]

Nicehash is a good working service in my opinion and has a very good use case for developers and also for testing, etc. If you can however really make good profits is on another page. In my opinion the people that rent on nicehash benefit often times more then the people that sell hashrate there.

Sounds like all these big pools are damn unreliable if you need to worry about failover ...

Well actually it is not that big of a deal, failover does work very well and automatically. So for me I don't bother if from time to time my hashrate will be redirected to another pool.

[mikeywith]

not to bash any pool service but each have thare pro-side and con-side

Indeed, I am not saying nicehash is worthless, or that people should not use it nor am i promoting another service, this topic is not even intended for how and what you should use nicehash for, this topic was to "expose" the marketing lies made by nicehash, which also reflects well to all other hash rental services, i find it annoying that when just so happen that some other x sha256 coin is paying well and suddenly NH is paying 6% more than mining directly to a BTC pool, you see NH posting that shit all over the internet, bragging about how you will make more profit when you mine to their service.

On the other hand, when THEY are paying 20% or 30% LESS than the average pool, they keep silent and don't mention anything about it, I am not asking for too much, not expecting them to come out and say (we are paying less now, use something else), all am asking is for them to stop doing these marketing lies, in other words, to keep their mouths shut in all cases, including those of which they pay more.

If any thinks that's a fine way of promoting your pool, then any pool that gets a lucky streak for 24 hours and post on their Twitter and here about how they pay 20% more than the average pool, and then on another day when they pay only 80% they act as it has never happened and everything that is left for the newbies to see is that "we are paying 20% more" which was true for x period of time, but despite it being accurate then, it is still a marketing lie.

[kano]

Sounds like all these big pools are damn unreliable if you need to worry about failover ...

Could be worse, you could be mining at a pool that has not found a block in over a year and a 1/2
...

Time is not part of the calculation in determining how good or bad luck a random event is.
Ignorance is bliss - I guess you have no idea about bitcoin mining.

My pool is currently at 385% on the current amount of work.
Can you even work out the probability of that? Nope, sure you can't.

385% or higher happens on every pool regularly ... about once every 47 blocks.

[DaveF]

Sounds like all these big pools are damn unreliable if you need to worry about failover ...

Could be worse, you could be mining at a pool that has not found a block in over a year and a 1/2
...

Time is not part of the calculation in determining how good or bad luck a random event is.
Ignorance is bliss - I guess you have no idea about bitcoin mining.

My pool is currently at 385% on the current amount of work.
Can you even work out the probability of that? Nope, sure you can't.

385% or higher happens on every pool regularly ... about once every 47 blocks.

And apparently you can't handle sarcasm.



But, as Phil (who is probably the largest miner we have on the board as a regular user) has pointed out NH does have it's uses.
My combined mining is probably a rounding error in his world and as I have pointed out it does have it's uses too.

Is their 'marketing' misleading? Yeah, probably.
Will anyone who really knows mining be taken in by it? Probably not.

There are people out there to where BTC mining is the be all and end all and nothing else matters and nothing else should be mined. That is fine it's their choice.

There are also people who mine everything that they can get equipment for and want to maximize profit. Also their choice.

There are people who mine for fun. Last I looked someone was mining defcoin with a L3+ It's non tradable and designed that way. Now are they mining for fun, or were they mining some scrypt coin and that was their fail over and have not noticed that is also a possibility. But that is their choice.

But in the end, and this is the important part, people are free to do with their equipment what they want. I choose to take a bit less in order to save time and effort. I choose to mine at a PPS pool since for various technical reasons it's a much better deal for me then PPLNS or any other format. Others will of course have different reasons for mining in different places.

-Dave

[Artemis3]

You don't need to failover from a Bitcoin pool to a non-bitcoin pool...
Even for rentals, there are options like Mining Rig Rentals and the like. There are also multi coin pools that exchange automatically to bitcoin and pay in bitcoin.
The only people who use nicehash, are the lazy ones who didn't know there were other options.
BTW during 2018 several months it was like this, you earned more equivalent fiat mining Bitcoin than altcoins if you sold immediately, which is the foolish thing to do instead of holding the sats for the future... You can see the bitcoin price of 2018 to figure out why, it was 2000~6000.

[kano]

Sounds like all these big pools are damn unreliable if you need to worry about failover ...

Could be worse, you could be mining at a pool that has not found a block in over a year and a 1/2
...

Time is not part of the calculation in determining how good or bad luck a random event is.
Ignorance is bliss - I guess you have no idea about bitcoin mining.

My pool is currently at 385% on the current amount of work.
Can you even work out the probability of that? Nope, sure you can't.

385% or higher happens on every pool regularly ... about once every 47 blocks.

And apparently you can't handle sarcasm.

An unrelated ignorant attack is not sarcasm.
Learn English while your at it also.

[mikeywith]

Is their 'marketing' misleading? Yeah, probably.

To be frank, It's more like certainly, i mean, there is no doubt that their marketing is indeed misleading

Will anyone who really knows mining be taken in by it? Probably not.

This is a subject of debate, see, Nicehash don't publish false data, when they tell you that "today we paid 20% more than the average pool" they are honest about it, it isn't something they can fake or hide, it's pretty easily determined and anyone would call them out on it, what they do instead is make advantage an extraordinary event and paint a picture for people to make them believe this is the norm when it isn't.

Now one can argue that up to this point, they are still "honest", but then when other opposite events happen and they pay 20% less than the average pool, they pretend that it doesn't happen, they keep their mouths shut until another special event that works in their favors happens, and they would use that AGAIN to mislead folks into thinking that Nicehash pays out more.

It's not an easy thing to spot, even for people who have been mining for a very long time, who on earth watches their daily payouts and compare it to other pools, 5 out of 10 miners, maybe, who does that every single day of the year? probably nobody, you need to be keen to catch them, write some code that runs 24/7 to collect all the numbers and then run them by the end of the year, otherwise, you need to get lucky to notice it, so I am willing to bet that the majority of people are not aware of this fact.

There are people out there to where BTC mining is the be all and end all and nothing else matters and nothing else should be mined. That is fine it's their choice.

There are also people who mine everything that they can get equipment for and want to maximize profit. Also their choice.

I totally agree, I would never tell someone what to do with their gear, or what gear to buy unless they ask for my help/opinion.

[DaveF]

You don't need to failover from a Bitcoin pool to a non-bitcoin pool...

Not saying you do. But I have a bunch of LTC miners and a few other algos too.
NH makes it simple in the fact that no matter what I have as the #2 pool in the config I get a few sats at NH. Eventually there would be enough to bother withdrawing.
And they do LN withdraws so that is cool too.

It happens so rarely and for such a short period of time, it's just not worth going other places.
I pulled all my funds out in Feb 2021 which was a couple of months after the final payback of their hack.

As of now I have barely $20 in there. Most of which happened when ETH went POS and I was not in the mood to start pulling the GPU rigs apart for a while so they mined through that weekend.
And another large chunk was when I screwed up a BGP config and dropped routing to most of the internet.
The others as I posted above were all a couple of minutes, or a few sats at most.

Spending time looking for another place to have miners fail to is not being lazy, but just a waste of time for amounts that small.
AND since they are short blips they need to be a PPS they would probably never get any payments

Somebody someplace was pulling the data from the nicehash API into good sheets and had a bunch of other data to go with it to show long term what they were paying. Have to see if I can find it, or if I am remembering properly what it was doing.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

I point an L3+ to nicehash it earns 0.000044 btc a day or $1.32 in usd.

it burns 575 watts and uses 120 volts.

My basement/den is cold so it is a space heater. Ie the space heater is needed 24/7/365

and it is very quiet. My wife and I can watch tv with no sound issues.

Only the L3+ can do this

if you have any btc miner that will earn $1.32 a day in btc using only 575 watts an hour it needs to be about 18th.

 a 1 board s17 can do that, but you must use 240 volts and the psu fans are loud.

people simply do not understand that nicehash has a purpose.

I would argue that the L3+ is a better btc miner than an s17pro.
But bitcointalk simply won't recognize this argument.  


Hey I have flat earth friends.
I tell them I think they're wrong, but it is not my job to know the real world and what it is.