Prohashing Mining Pool Forums

jeffms2003 wrote: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'm betting the IRS will disagree with that. If you were already taxed for mining the coins, then you can sell them and just pay capital gains on it depending how long it was held determines the capital gains tax applied.

But if you are just going to sell coins out of nowhere they might ask for proof of a purchase of coins with money you were already taxed on in order to qualify to only pay capital gains taxes.

You sell 100 coins you were never taxed on for mining and have no proof of purchase don't be surprised if you have to pay regular income taxes on the money plus self-employment taxes on top.

Consult a tax consultant before you make the decision that you are NOT a contractor. The IRS might disagree.

I keep track of how much I mine daily in terms of USD and will report it as revenue based on the average price of the coin for that day (my coin basis and proof of purchase of coins). I will then keep track of any capital gains/losses upon sale and report that separately (I plan on using FIFO as my basis). My mother in law is a CPA and we have discussed how to handle my taxes to be in compliance with tax law. Obviously, I suggest everyone consults with their CPA to determine how they should handle their taxes for their individual situation.

We need additional information about how the Monday night changes have affected hashrates since they were introduced about 30 hours ago.

Have your miners seen an improvement in hashrates on Tuesday compared to previous days?

jeffms2003 wrote:I keep track of how much I mine daily in terms of USD and will report it as revenue based on the average price of the coin for that day (my coin basis and proof of purchase of coins). I will then keep track of any capital gains/losses upon sale and report that separately (I plan on using FIFO as my basis). My mother in law is a CPA and we have discussed how to handle my taxes to be in compliance with tax law. Obviously, I suggest everyone consults with their CPA to determine how they should handle their taxes for their individual situation.

OK, the new release is now out, and I'm curious to see whether the "live hashrates" displayed on the website are acceptable to you now. The reported total pool hashrate is now up to 2.348MS/s on Equihash, which is about 12% higher than yesterday, so I think that the changes resolved that problem.

If there is a problem with profitability, then it probably still exists and I'm continuing to investigate it. I'm looking for confirmation that the specific issue with reported hashrates has been resolved first, because there are clearly two separate issues.

I think the issue before was the profits were down 10% or more from other places. If all you did was fix a display error so it now shows the correct hashrate but didn't touch the profit then nothing has changed has it? Difficulty dropped last night on the litecoin network, so litecoinpool rose in its payouts and should stay that way for the next 3 days until the next difficulty readjustment.

Before I would hash on here at 550 instead of 600, and I got paid for 550 hash.
Now it shows I'm hashing at 600, but still only getting paid like I was hashing at before at 550.

If I'm now making MORE hash but at the same total rate as before since it was just a display error, does that mean the pool is paying even LESS now per MH? If I made $100 at 550 hash and now I'm making $100 at 600 hash, isnt the 1MH/s payment now even lower than it was before? So were the expected MH/s charts wrong as they have been using larger time intervals to determine expected payouts all this time? Or do the charts use the actual shares recorded and not the time bucket method to compute profits?

Steve Sokolowski wrote:

jeffms2003 wrote:I keep track of how much I mine daily in terms of USD and will report it as revenue based on the average price of the coin for that day (my coin basis and proof of purchase of coins). I will then keep track of any capital gains/losses upon sale and report that separately (I plan on using FIFO as my basis). My mother in law is a CPA and we have discussed how to handle my taxes to be in compliance with tax law. Obviously, I suggest everyone consults with their CPA to determine how they should handle their taxes for their individual situation.

OK, the new release is now out, and I'm curious to see whether the "live hashrates" displayed on the website are acceptable to you now. The reported total pool hashrate is now up to 2.348MS/s on Equihash, which is about 12% higher than yesterday, so I think that the changes resolved that problem.

If there is a problem with profitability, then it probably still exists and I'm continuing to investigate it. I'm looking for confirmation that the specific issue with reported hashrates has been resolved first, because there are clearly two separate issues.

My reported hash rates were looking a lot better in terms of being in line with what I would expect. Still a bit light, but within reason. Since 11pm CST last night when the profitability charts reset, I've been on track to make 8% less today when I extrapolate over a 24 hour time period, so I'm switching to other pools that will give me a bit more on the day. I'll do a switchover of 2 L3++ here in a bit to parallel test against litecoinpool.org and will let you know how they compare.

CSZiggy wrote:I think the issue before was the profits were down 10% or more from other places. If all you did was fix a display error so it now shows the correct hashrate but didn't touch the profit then nothing has changed has it? Difficulty dropped last night on the litecoin network, so litecoinpool rose in its payouts and should stay that way for the next 3 days until the next difficulty readjustment.

Before I would hash on here at 550 instead of 600, and I got paid for 550 hash.
Now it shows I'm hashing at 600, but still only getting paid like I was hashing at before at 550.

If I'm now making MORE hash but at the same total rate as before since it was just a display error, does that mean the pool is paying even LESS now per MH? If I made $100 at 550 hash and now I'm making $100 at 600 hash, isnt the 1MH/s payment now even lower than it was before? So were the expected MH/s charts wrong as they have been using larger time intervals to determine expected payouts all this time? Or do the charts use the actual shares recorded and not the time bucket method to compute profits?

There has been no change in payouts. Whether the amount paid is correct or incorrect, the issue that was resolved was solely a display issue. It's explained in a different thread if you're interested in the details. Because the display issue for hashrate was resolved (which increased displayed hashrate), displayed profitability may decline, because profitability is total earned / hashrate. However, since litecoin difficulty declined at the same time, it's likely that today's displayed profitability will remain the same as yesterday's.

As to earnings, that's definitely a separate issue. I ran some queries into this problem and I found some interesting data - it turns out that we are somehow luckier than average across almost all coins, which is improbable. This issue was never noticed before because there were many other errors (like the weights issue and the low hashrate issue) that hid it. At the same time, we noticed that the getdifficulty() method of NewYorkcoin returns a different difficulty that mismatches the getblocktemplate()'s "bits." If we are using the wrong difficulty to submit blocks, that means some blocks are being accidentally withheld from the network and we can improve profits by fixing that.

I've been mining 8 hours with 2 L3++ machines on prohashing and 2 on litecoinpool.org. Litecoinpool.org has resulted in 5% more revenue in terms of dollars. I don't know what to tell you to help you determine what is causing the issue.

jeffms2003 wrote:I've been mining 8 hours with 2 L3++ machines on prohashing and 2 on litecoinpool.org. Litecoinpool.org has resulted in 5% more revenue in terms of dollars. I don't know what to tell you to help you determine what is causing the issue.

I think I figured out how litecoinpool earns extra profit. Their terms of service states that they take "donations" from customers who leave the pool after not replying to three E-Mails to claim them. I suspect that they probably end up with a 5% profit because that's the amount of money that we pay out to customers who refuse to accept payouts within 90 days. A policy that requires people to reply to E-Mails lacks transparency.

Still, we are showing LTC + 10%, so that "policy" doesn't explain the full difference. I think this difficulty issue has something to do with it, and I'll continue the investigation.

Steve Sokolowski wrote:

jeffms2003 wrote:I've been mining 8 hours with 2 L3++ machines on prohashing and 2 on litecoinpool.org. Litecoinpool.org has resulted in 5% more revenue in terms of dollars. I don't know what to tell you to help you determine what is causing the issue.

I think I figured out how litecoinpool earns extra profit. Their terms of service states that they take "donations" from customers who leave the pool after not replying to three E-Mails to claim them. I suspect that they probably end up with a 5% profit because that's the amount of money that we pay out to customers who refuse to accept payouts within 90 days. A policy that requires people to reply to E-Mails lacks transparency.

Still, we are showing LTC + 10%, so that "policy" doesn't explain the full difference. I think this difficulty issue has something to do with it, and I'll continue the investigation.

Another thing to consider is merged mining. I'm not sure if you guys do that or not with the setup. F2pool is offering 1000 DOGE for every 1 LTC mined. One L3++ could mine pretty close to 1 LTC in a month, so the extra $2.30 is about 3%. I'm assuming that factors in more to litecoinpool.org ability to offer 101% PPS than money folks leave behind.