Looking for more information about reduced hashrate miners

[Steve Sokolowski]

After some looking into this, I determined that the duplicate shares are definitely caused by the mining server, because multiple customers are finding the same shares. The issue is present on all algorithms except equihash, and has been present for at least a year, but it was simply never uncovered until now because there were so many higher priority issues.

Once resolved, this fix will definitely increase hashrate.

[jeffms2003]

Ok, well make a clear announcement once it is fixed and I'll move my hash power back over and give it a shot. My 24 hour SHA rate per TH/s/Day is about 3% less than prohashing; however, I'm getting about 7% more has rate credit. LTC about the same rate per MH/s/Day, but I'm getting about 8-10% more hash rate credit. For me that adds up to about $60-$100 more per month in revenue, so I had to make the switch.

[CSZiggy]

...LTC about the same rate per MH/s/Day, but I'm getting about 8-10% more hash rate credit. For me that adds up to about $60-$100 more per month in revenue, so I had to make the switch.

What I've found anytime the difficulty drops under a line on my graph, one pool pays out better based on price vs another based on difficulty and percentages.

[Steve Sokolowski]

We deployed a change last night to solve the "duplicate shares" miners, but that didn't resolve the issue with them. The only conclusion I can draw now is that those miners are misconfigured and are mining the same shares as other miners on the same connection. I'm not going to bother investigating that anymore.

I'm now looking into the issues people are reporting with profits. For this discussion, I'd like to only concentrate on scrypt miners. I'm having difficulty understanding why some customers are attributing profitability differences between pools to work restarts. The profitability difference yesterday was LTC + 13%. One poster said that his hashrate was reduced by 5-8% due to work restarts, and therefore he said he was switching to another pool.

What I don't understand is why he says he would receive more money at another pool. Since profitability here was 13% higher yesterday, but he only lost up to 8% hashrate at maximum due to work restarts, the math seems to indicate that he should expect to earn at least 5% more mining here. What am I misunderstanding about this situation? Even if the other pool had a zero fee (our estimate of LTC profitability includes an average 2.5% fee), he should still expect 2.5% more in the worst case.

[jeffms2003]

Go to litecoinpool.org and calculate the revenue per mh/s/day and you’ll find that the profitability you are attributing in your calculation to just mining litecoin is incorrect. For yesterday you show $.0042/mh/s/day as your LTC only baseline; however when I mined on litecoinpool.org I actually received $.0046/mh/s/day. Your calculations are understating the comparisons to BTC and LTC and thus overstating profitability variance. If you adjust for that the analysis you discussed above supports the case that you make more money elsewhere. I’m more than happy to have a phone conversation to help clear up the analysis.

[CSZiggy]

First I would suggest, Put up a poll for the scrypt miners, check to see how they feel about the CHART data first.
How accurate is the 1/mh/s expected payout for you and your scrypt mining on this pool?

If you find only 50% of the miners are hitting what you say is the expected payout maybe the chart data is wrong or being misinterpreted or missing some info. Maybe if you have a single miner you hit those expected numbers, but on a multi-miner setup for whatever reason, I've never hit that expected. Not sure if there is some kind of compounding error but it seemed the more miners I had on the pool from a single location the farther off from the expected payout I was. My brother with his single miner has hit the expected quite a bit when his machine points here.

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I've run tests in the past with 10 miners on 1 site, 10 on the other, and swapped them after 3 days to make sure it wasnt the testing sets it was the pools that were affecting the results.

On a 6-day test, PH came close to a tie on 1 day and was lower on the other 5.
Call it recognizing a higher hashrate, or less stales, or no restarts but litecoinpool pays straight LTC at a higher rate DEPENDING ON LTC DIFFICULTY.

PH is a price based pool. As the prices go up miners make more profit $ wise, but the number of coins paid out could be less. Depending on the price of the LTCs, you could make 10% more $ than you made yesterday while making 10% less coins.
Litecoinpool is difficulty based. As fewer people mine it every 3 days, causing the difficulty to drop, the profits go up as you get more coins.
When the difficulty goes up the pool pays out less coins, but the number of coins paid out stays the same for 3 days at a time.

Some of the issue might be in trying to compare $ priced profit vs. number of LTCs paid out by mining.
Since the price of the coins fluctuates, the bottom line indicator for me is how many coins I received into my personal wallet the following day.

Maybe instead of looking at how much $ is paid, which based on the price of the coins will flux daily, examine how many coins are paid out from each, as this will give you 3 days at a time to compare before the values change at litecoinpool. Then maybe figure out if there is a bigger loss at exchanging coins or where other loss might be to tighten up profits. Does the pool mine many LTCs to pay out everyone who requests them?
Do other coins mined get sold to pay out the LTCs? Does selling a mined coin for less and then buying a LTC for payout lose enough in the transaction to make it less profitable than it should be?

[jeffms2003]

This is all too complicated. There is a simple solution. Give users a user specific dashboard that shows 24 hour average hash rate per algo, the earnings for that algo, the calculated rate/s/day. It should be a simple calculation and will tell me what I’m making, what my hash rate is, and how my earnings compare to the pool stats. I can factually tell you I am making 5% more money on other pools than on prohashing regardless of what the dashboard calculations say. Actual proof trumps ambigous pool level calculations that are far too complicated.

[Steve Sokolowski]

An update in response to some of these posts.

First, I looked into the "LTC" line on the charts and verified that it is correct. The LTC line is the block reward + transaction fees of LTC, divided by the number of hashes required on average to find one block, multiplied by the dollar price, minus 4%. The 5% is for a 1% pool fee at a very low cost pool, 2.5% for the lowest possible orphan rate theoretically achievable on LTC due to network latency around the planet, and 1.5% for "low luck miners" that are equally likely to be present at every pool. 1% gets added for merge-mining, which we assume every pool offers.

If what people are reporting is true, then they are indicating that litecoinpool is cutting out that 1% pool fee, which makes it difficult for me to understand how they remain in operation. My assumption is that they are not operating legally and that they are cutting costs by not distributing the required tax forms, since I don't see their names or any way to input the data on their website. Dealing with the tax forms cost us about $20,000 in the past few months. Unfortunately, since we're not going to do the same, and since the government is more concerned with prosecuting weed users than ensuring a fair playing field, we could never operate a zero-fee pool.

On the other hand, if it is true that lower profits here are caused by lower hashrates, and those lower hashrates are caused by frequent work restarts, then we can easily adjust the code that handles work restarts. Chris is going to release a new version of the mining server this afternoon to handle work restarts differently, and we'll see how hashrate and profitability are affected by that.

[jeffms2003]

Their overhead is probably less and thus the improved profitability. I’m sure their infrastructure is much more simple assuming they don’t do all the complicated mining of multiple coins. My calculations on $/mh/s/day are simply based on my daily earnings divided by my 24 hour hash rate and it isn’t equal to your calculations, so I don’t know what to tell you other than I know what I’m calculating.

Regarding tax forms, they don’t owe me any tax forms because my machine is doing all the work on the network and is just connected to the blockchain through their servers so I’m not a contractor to them. I keep my own records and will fike my taxes properly so I don’t really care what they do in regards to tax forms. If they are doing the same they will have no issues with the IRS.

[CSZiggy]

The 5% is for a 1% pool fee at a very low cost pool, 2.5% for the lowest possible orphan rate theoretically achievable on LTC due to network latency around the planet, and 1.5% for "low luck miners" that are equally likely to be present at every pool. 1% gets added for merge-mining, which we assume every pool offers.

While every pool might offer merge-mining, not all miners get the credit. On litecoinpool the pool keeps the merged.
Maybe since litecoinpool is only paying out in LTC but is mining merged as well, you need to modify your baseline comparison when talking about LTCpool to also include the merged mining that would be paid at the same time as the LTCs.


You wanted to know how they remain profitable? Imagine if this pool only paid the coin the miners were mining, and the pool kept all the merged mining. What's the profit on merged mining? If you switched your pricing around to give miners the coin and kept all the merged mining for the pool as a payout/profit what would you have to charge in fee % to make/maintain the same profit the pool is making now?


jeffms2003--I very much doubt litecoinpool is being compliant with the U.S. IRS, but then again I do not believe they reside within the US territories or answer to the IRS or the US so I very much doubt they care.