A close hard look at pool profitability - or - results are what matters

[yeominer]

based on actual measurement, for sha256, turn out - normalized in USD for sha256 mining over the past 1 1/2 week consistently came in just under what nicehash makes (with a single unit scout and then confirmed with 20x S9 miners), compared to bitcoin.com being consistently 5% higher - mining bch; so it seems the 5% fee on this pool for the most part defeats any significant profit advantage for the miners over the others, and leaves the "any coin payout" as a remaining motivation.

being a die-hard prohasing user, I had hoped ever since the early days in scrypt and x11 for this pools coin-switching to prove a tangible higher turn-out; but that seems to increasingly get "lost in translation" (5% for fees and pool's risk retainer)

meanwhile coin exchange / transfer tax as such has become less and lesser of an issue since ever more cheaper exchanges have come online, incl. one-click "shapeshifters" (with an api even).

this means the benefit of the coin-switching algorithm, which is at the core of this pools differentiating value proposition, seems to be defeated outright.

with the pool offering sha256 for a while now, it seems to at least hold up on par (sort a), while scrypt and x11 profitability seem to compete daily for last in contest. sadly. miningpoolhub taking the cake for profit-switching AND auto-exchange, nicehash for above average reliability, lower btc payout fee AND free-of charge btc coinbase transfer (not even a btc network fee means nicehash online wallets likely are multi-signature wallets at coinbase in the first place). Add to it that prohashing's one universal port for all algos (which appears to be a unique while to the point stubbornly defended design decision) actually makes real-time profitability data capture per algo / worker impossible .. seems to defeat an otherwise great US-based, hardworking teams effort ..
and questions the business value of (in Steve's blog patiently elaborated) great engineering, sophisticated coupling of mining, trading and pool operations.

with all due respect, and rooting for team prohashing, the teams frequent public articles and cases for transformative change and high standards among the wider crypto community, I sincerely hope for some down-to-earth critical self-evaluation of these business results and developments, to hopefully secure the business (model) for the time to come.

truly yours,

[CSZiggy]

why bother, no one cares.

[yeominer]

you may still technically owe taxes on all those conversions.

i was referring to 'taxes' not in the real sense of gov taxes but fees charged by pool, network or exchange "taxing" transfers. no disagreement on gov taxable events ontop of any of the scenarios.

[yeominer]

I've not compared Miningpoolhub, but I do know litecoinpool was higher than both nicehash or prohashing any of the times I have checked it for scrypt payouts as a comparison. Have you tested payouts on litecoinpool for scrypt to compare with miningpoolhub recently?

hv not bothered to try scrypt on miningpoolhub, concur with litecoinpool beating nh or ph everytime (keeping scouts running at other pools for representative daily comparison) AND often coming in significant above whattomine estimates.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I had planned to perform an experiment myself about this weekend. So far, however, the only results I've found are that the miner I used to test is broken. However, in my initial results, which are yet too short to eliminate the possibility of luck, I have not been able to reproduce what you have said about litecoinpool.org.

In regards to SHA-256, that is a different story. Roger Ver has been pushing BCH for a while now by subsidizing mining on his bitcoin.com pool, paying out "negative fees" at times. The purpose of his pool doesn't seem to be to make money, but rather to serve as an advertising platform or to pull hashrate from bitcoin. He is one of the richest people in the world, and I wouldn't be surprised if he would be willing to eat 10%. It's actually pretty miraculous that we can be even with his operation. If so, then we provide many more features than his pool and I'm confident in our offerings.

I don't know about NiceHash's profitability (note that their fees are 3-5% as well, charged upon withdrawal), but I do know that if you ever have a problem with them, good luck trying to contact them. I've never received a response from any communication I've ever sent to them. There was one ticket that someone else submitted asking how they calculate equihash difficulty, and instead of helping the customer, their customer service sent a rude reply suggesting that they use another pool. They have taken no action to address the "low luck miners" that are abusing their services.

I also know that the only reason NiceHash is operating now is likely because no lawsuit has been filed to enjoin them from operations. They are an insolvent company that is giving preferential treatment to new creditors, the same way Bitfinex was. Should someone decide to sue, they could suddenly close and customer balances will be seized to pay everyone equally. In your calculations, make sure you reduce their profitability by whatever you believe the expected value is of that happening.

We're working to improve profits every day. The major way we are doing that right now is by Vance's resolving of trading and payout issues that are wasting money. We were able to raise sell prices 2% across the board last weekend and yesterday. Adding the Upbit exchange will increase profits even more. In regards to reliability, we're pretty confident that the mining server has very few issues, because anything that comes up now is a one in two years event or even rarer, and every issue that comes up is permanently fixed so that particular issue won't happen again.

Finally, as to that issue about ports, that's something that will need to be changed anyway when Ethereum mining is released, so that's already listed to be resolved. However, I'm not clear as to whether the suggestion is to have one port per algorithm, which is the change that will be made in a month, or the ability to view earnings by algorithm, which is listed for implementation on the website but not yet scheduled.

[oppresseddude]

i feel ur pain yoeman

[oppresseddude]

im thinking of taking the 10% lost and buying the crypto instead

[oppresseddude]

I was told my miners are lying to me about their efficiency.. per Steve

[oppresseddude]

LMAO!

[yeominer]

In regards to SHA-256, that is a different story. Roger Ver has been pushing BCH for a while now by subsidizing mining on his bitcoin.com pool, paying out "negative fees" at times. The purpose of his pool doesn't seem to be to make money, but rather to serve as an advertising platform or to pull hashrate from bitcoin. He is one of the richest people in the world, and I wouldn't be surprised if he would be willing to eat 10%. It's actually pretty miraculous that we can be even with his operation. If so, then we provide many more features than his pool and I'm confident in our offerings.

I am not disagreeing, it is the major leagues, regardless of one or 500 asics to manage.
and I was exited to find Prohashing entering the game. However, the issue stands that (higher) profitability through coin switching (or smartly distributing hash power, and sharing the profits equally) is a value proposition that at the end of the day needs to deliver. My experience has been that PH comes out on par, consequently I have emphasized that the auto-exchange remains as differentiator. But the apparent disappointment is the (maybe unjust?) higher expectation for PH to actually make the clever orchestration of coin-switching, trading automation and auto-exchange actually payout higher compared to just once a day figure if BTC or BCH is gone be the coin of the day, set it and forget it on a monster pool till next day (or actually have awesomeminer.com do it automatically from coinwarz or whattomine data, see at bottom for more)

I don't know about NiceHash's profitability (note that their fees are 3-5% as well, charged upon withdrawal), but I do know that if you ever have a problem with them, good luck trying to contact them. I've never received a response from any communication I've ever sent to them. There was one ticket that someone else submitted asking how they calculate equihash difficulty, and instead of helping the customer, their customer service sent a rude reply suggesting that they use another pool. They have taken no action to address the "low luck miners" that are abusing their services.

My experience is that Nicehash (ever since the relaunch) seems more committed to its users, a general debate is of little use, hence the sharing of experiences. NH charges 2.25% fees, for the online wallet, 3% for external wallet, everytime a daily mining reward gets deposited (notwithstanding min payout I believe is 0.001 btc for online wallet) and in addition offers a unique instant and one-click "withdraw to my coinbase acct " feature (read "instantaneous", no delay or confirmation time !) free of charge - not even bitcoin network fee. in addition NH now offers a private discord for instant support for its top 500 miners, and recently added public channels for any user. email support tickets from recent experience hv turnaround time of 24-48h. that is not to say that actual response or solution is always satisfactory.

I also know that the only reason NiceHash is operating now is likely because no lawsuit has been filed to enjoin them from operations. They are an insolvent company that is giving preferential treatment to new creditors, the same way Bitfinex was. Should someone decide to sue, they could suddenly close and customer balances will be seized to pay everyone equally. In your calculations, make sure you reduce their profitability by whatever you believe the expected value is of that happening.

that is well beyond my horizon and frankly of no immediate concern, from a professional mining operations pov, the calculated risk is a days payout, a weeks or however long one decides appropriate to entrust any pool with funds vs. the benefit of competitive turn-out and stable operation, and they are very reliable. corporate law suits seem academic, NH corporate veil seems established in Slovakia. Even if they were US based, crypto issues could not even be meaningfully be tried in the US. they just payed out the 4th of 10 monthly installment on owed mining rewards at the time of the hack. not much else one can ask.

We're working to improve profits every day. The major way we are doing that right now is by Vance's resolving of trading and payout issues that are wasting money. We were able to raise sell prices 2% across the board last weekend and yesterday. Adding the Upbit exchange will increase profits even more. In regards to reliability, we're pretty confident that the mining server has very few issues, because anything that comes up now is a one in two years event or even rarer, and every issue that comes up is permanently fixed so that particular issue won't happen again.

I am sure many will agree in appreciation and deep respect for your teams engineering abilities and efforts.

Finally, as to that issue about ports, that's something that will need to be changed anyway when Ethereum mining is released, so that's already listed to be resolved. However, I'm not clear as to whether the suggestion is to have one port per algorithm, which is the change that will be made in a month, or the ability to view earnings by algorithm, which is listed for implementation on the website but not yet scheduled.

One use case is simply to allow miners to establish how profitable the different algos actually were (and divide it by # devices on same algo to capture avg device profitablity), currently when pointing an L3 and an X11 at PH during the same 24h period cannot be allocated which algo did what (comparing it to your live est or historical). Although I use the workaround to use 3333 for one algo and use the proxy port for the other. That fails as soon as one wants to add a third algo. say point S9s as well, which I also do.

In addition, one of the more (most?) common mining automation software apps called awesomeminer.com has all the profit switching and the bulk pool-configuration / switching features riding on unique stratum urls (an algo specific port makes the url unique). While it has easy-pre-configurations readily available for pretty much the entire league of coin-switching pools, NH, MHP, zpool.. and the EU favorites miningdutch, etc.. I strongly root for PH to make it into that list, since from a fellow business owners perspective, it would add invaluable exposure to miners of all sizes around the globe while adding quality of service to common configuration approaches.
Currently PH is even mentioned "negatively" in their Help section that due to the common port issue it will likely "never be supported". Lets just turn this around in mutual interest, and get positive mention in one of their next updates ?!