Crypto Coin Man: 2015

Sunday, February 15, 2015

JouleCoin (XJO) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

No premine
Hashing algo: SHA-256
Block time: 45 seconds
Block reward: 16 XJO
Reward halves every 2 years
Minimum reward 0.001 XJO
Total coins produced: ~ 45 million XJO
RPC Port: 8844
P2P Port: 26789
Difficulty re-targets every block
Transactions comments
Current Network Difficulty: 50,000

Pools:

Block Explorer:

Cryptoid

Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is this coin is really fast! Transactions show up in the offline wallets almost instantly after submitted. It also validates transfers after just 6 confirmations, directly mined coins "mature" after just 100, but even that amount of confirmations only takes an hour! If the network speed were faster (6 TH/s at testing) so would the transaction speed! All in all the coin is worth mining, it has spiked above BTC in value on a couple occasions (during my testing it went from 15th to 5th in coin value! Imagine what 20 or 200 TH/s would do!) and can be quite profitable with the current difficulty in the tens of thousands still. For the meantime just pick a good pool and stockpile, it's only a matter of time with this one, the rewards don't half for 2 years!

#1 MiningPools:

Pool Hashrate: 1.5-2.5 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.5-2.5 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 10,340 XJO!
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: <2 minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: There were a couple other miners in the 100 GH/s range coming and going but it's proportional so they never really effected my pay percentage and I was personally finding 27 blocks an hour, enough said! Winner, Winner!

#2 TomPool:

Pool Hashrate: 1.5-2.5 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.5-2.5 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 9,404 XJO (suggested was ~12,000)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: <2 minutes
Reward Method: PPS
My Thoughts: Since I was solo mining on there and got exactly 15.84 XJO from every block found and that's a great return for me and a small percentage for the server! I was also getting a great hash-rate, so even more blocks! Since it's PPS it scales better, so if there were other people mining here the payout would be even higher on average. Also had a less than 1% invalid rate and very rarely saw and orphaned block (maybe 2%), which is drastically different in comparison to the solo mining pool.

#3 MiningPoolCo:

Pool Hashrate: 1.6-2.1 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.5-2 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 8,982 XJO
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: <2 minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: They have a great status screen with all the detailed results for the pool and your earnings in one place, with a hash-rate graph that included yours, the pool's, and the network's hash-rates. Also had a less than 2% orphan rate.

#4 E-Pool:

Pool Hashrate: 1.6-2 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.3-1.7 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 8,412 XJO
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: ~3 minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: I basically earned 12 XJO for every block found, and I found more than 90% of the blocks so the difference isn't worth it. I am basically losing out compared to solo mining and for no reason, there just isn't enough power at the pool and the hash-rate it provides you is too low to justify using it. If you could set up your own node, different story. Also their instructions are set up for their old node on port 8925, big mistake that could cost you! The correct stratum port is 8930! Since it's P2P Miner payouts are instant, you just have to wait for them to mature / confirm in your wallet (100 confirms on offline wallets for direct mining, but even that only takes an hour).

#5 CoinMine:

Pool Hashrate: 1.5-1.6TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.5-1.6TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 7,918 XJO (Suggesting ~11k)
Fees:
Average Round Duration: ~2 minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: Difficulty I was getting was stuck at 1k, so I couldn't really get a good hashrate here, it just stuck in the 1.5 TH/s range the whole time. There were about 500 GH/s of other miners, just not sure the pool could handle much more as my hashrate would fluctuate opposite of theirs. It is a nice layout though and good dashboard.

#6 SecurePayments (SOLO):

Pool Hashrate: 1.1-2.2 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-2.1 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 7,450 XJO
Fees: 3%
Average Round Duration: ~3 minutes
Reward Method: 97% to the block finder.
My Thoughts: It was only pulling a 1k difficulty so the fact it was even getting up to 2 TH/s is a real shocker. If the server could manage difficulty settings better this would drastically improve. But overall I did find 22 blocks an hour, minus the quite large 10% orphan rate, 20 blocks is still a good find. The difficulty is still in the thousands, so solo mining is still definitely a feasible option.

#7 iSpace:

Pool Hashrate: 2-4 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-3 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 6,701 XJO
Fees:
Average Round Duration: ~1 minute
Reward Method:PROP
My Thoughts:As usual some pretty poor results, for PROP reward system and not having to worry about pool switching it pays out terrible! MiningPools.tk is also PROP and has a much better hashrate, so just stay away from ispace.. I mined 678 blocks myself, yet only received 6,701 out of 10,848 I personally mined!? And there was also another person finding blocks, so where's all that coin!? The only thing PROPortional here is how much iSpace steals from you! Straight up THIEF!

Got some spare XJO, throw em my way: JVpUfyQ3KNz54DBB5MLstW5MkVHivYD1sA

Saturday, February 14, 2015

iSpace Multipool Comparison and the Major Issues it's Causing with the Altcoin Network!

All testing performed by Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 MHZ) and my conclusion is that all of their pools have the same flaw, they just don't profit you in the end. Now you might think that is because of the fluctuating cost of the coins but it's not. You generally get a lower hash-rate here compared to any other pool to begin with, but on top of that, your scoring/prop hashrate is lowered even further by your own pool switching too fast or the other pools running into each-other and causing massive difficulty variances in the network, the bulk of the altcoins are set up so that pool hopping doesn't benefit anyone! You will make more coin by solo mining each one individually, or just by mining BTC and trading for the coin of your choice, than you will ever make on any of their multi-pools at iSpace. I do believe their poor tactics in pool switching and lack of properly informing their users on pool choices is the major reason the alt-coin market is so poor and unstable. Excluding PPC nearly the entire network force behind all the various altcoins is held up in iSpace pool 1, the coin-wars profitability pool, that is beyond too much power for an automatic switching pool based on a faulty calculation to have! You are literally handing the keys over to wallstreet! Yet you wonder why ALL the stocks have crashed!?

If I was forced to use iSpace multi-pool in some bizarro universe as my only source of mining cryptocurrency, these would be my choices and in order or best use:

#1 Pool 5: The "Five" Pool

"This pool rotates on an 2-hourly basis through 5 coins chosen by us. Our current choices are Acoin, Unobtanium, TerraCoin, eMark and TitCoin." -iSpace

Pool Hashrate: 6-10 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-3 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 105 DEM; 37 Acoin; 62 TRC; 472 TIT; 0.18 UNO
Fees: 0%
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: This option is definitely better than profitability pool, and probably the best overall option due to the proper time frame for the coin switch, plus it doesn't run you into basically dead coins like some of the other pools do. Still wish it was 6 coins so there was a full day, but that's another story. Now it does contain the same coins the profitability pool runs into on a haphazard basis as it usually has coins that have been popular recently or have a decent 14 day average. The coins in this pool usually have less difficulty so mining is good but when the pools overlap it can make you earn dramatically less as the difficulty skyrockets while the variance adapts on their pool and network depending on the coin I wish this pool had the largest following, it would help maintain a healthier exchange rate for the market too!! Letting the market dictate what coin to mine is exactly why we have such a poor altoin market!! We need to control the market, not let the market control us!!

#2 Pool 2: Lowest Difficulty Pool

"This pool monitors the difficulty settings of our coins and always mines the pool with the lowest value. Difficulty values are checked at 15 minute intervals." -iSpace

Pool Hashrate: 6-10 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-3 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 4,861 ASC; 1,510 BDSM; 13,146 BRM, 92,775 CTM; 117 FETISH; .02 VIK
Fees: 0%
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: If you actually plan on making money from altcoins you need one thing, coins, and this is the way to get them in mass if you plan on mining them directly rather than trading. Of course earning money on them is based on hope in future market growth. But that's the name of the game. And too bad for us they still have pools set up for coins which are completely dead, like CTM (Continuum Coin), got ~100k coins of worthlessness! There is no exchange, all the sites are dead, developers have left the building! (I later found allcrypt had it listed on the doge market, with no-one buying and an exchange of basically 0 BTC, 100k CTM = 2 doge = 0.00000120 BTC) And BRM is only on one exchange, an exchange that doesn't even have a matching security certificate, so no thank you! iSpace strikes again..

#3 Pool 3: Rotation Pool

"This pool simply rotates through all of our available pools on an hourly basis." -iSpace

Pool Hashrate: 2-4 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-3 TH/s
30 Hour Earnings: 9 Acoin; 3,985 ASC; 320 BET; 301,246 NBE; 8,799 BRM; 69 CCC; 12,259 CTM; 17 CURE; 2.5 DEM; 1,833 DGB; 5,310 FFC; .0007 GHC; 37 HAM; 287 XJO; 350 MZC; 12,937 MEC; 621 MYR; 314 OSC; 102 ORO; 330 XPD; 4.5 SFR; 11,612 TAK; 18.5 TEK; 626 TGC; 104 TIT; .035 UNO; .13 VIK; 13 WNK; 25 ZET
Fees: 0%
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: There's nothing special to this, but it can be a great way just to stockpile every coin they mine. Unfortunately they messed this up too! It skips several coins for some unknown reason, beside Bitcoin it skipped AmKoin, AurumCoin, BDSM, CrownCoin, Freicoin, FetishCoin, Peercoin, NEOS, St Louis Coin, TerraCoin, and Unbreakable. But besides the programmers incompetence at providing what he advertises, it's rotation period is long enough that you will actually get the most from each one. It goes through each coin in alphabetical order based on coin symbol, it can look like it's jumping around at time because of that. Of course you could just do it individually/manually for a day at a time and get even better results. But it's a nice lazy-man's option. Unfortunately several coins on his pool list are completely worthless and never will be worth anything again as the projects have been abandoned by developers.

#4 Pool 1: CoinWarz Profitibility Pool

"This pool monitors the CoinWarz website every 3 minutes and looks to switch to the most profitable pool at any given time providing the current exchange rate exceeds 0.0000001 BTC. SHA256 pools exclude Bitcoin and PeerCoin." -iSpace

Pool Hashrate: 40-85 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-3 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 96 DEM; 781 HAM; 396 MZC; 144 NEOS; 295 OSC; 193 TIT; 49 WNK (Totaling 0.01366595 BTC at the current exchange rate)
Fees: 0%
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: Complete BS and a waste of time, the biggest issue with this pool is it's main function, it pulls stats from Coin-Wars and they suggest completely off the wall figures for mining capability. Generally stating you can mine 2-10 times as much as you actually can (Besides BTC and Peercoin, the two coins iSpace excludes from their switching, coin-wars is usually very accurate with those two coins since they have a somewhat stable market and network). Their figures are based on trade volume and price compared to BTC, they don't actually factor fluctuating difficulty into this and that causes drastically lower than advertised results. So basing a pool entirely off of this type of feature is ludicrous! The worst pool option they have yet it's their busiest pool none the less. On top of that, the fact the pool can switch coins every 3 minutes based on those results is insane! So for the first several minutes you have a bad scoring hash-rate and just when you're about to get a good rate to start earning coins the pool switches and the cycle repeats. If they set this to something like 15 minutes it would be a different story. The winner from this pool is clearly iSpace. This pool with up to 100 TH/s is LEADING cause the altoin market is so fickle! Don't let the market control you! You should control the market!!

#5 Pool 4: Newest Pool

"This pool mines our latest SHA256 coin pools, rotating every 2 hours. These are currently "NeosCoin, BDSM, Fetish, CrownCoin and GamerHolicCoin."" -iSpace

Pool Hashrate: 4-7 TH/s
My Hashrate:1-3 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 437 GHC
Fees: 0%
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: Once again, a much better time frame for switching, unfortunately it didn't actually switch, it stuck on GamerHolicCoin the ENTIRE DAY! And is actually still is on GHC days later, never having switched. But even if it did work properly at 2 hours each I wish they would have made it 6 coins so it's a full day, so each coin mines twice per day. And rather than just new coins to the iSpace network I wish it was the newest coins period, that's where the most money can be made, before a coin get's popular to begin with / right off the opening announcement. But I do get their point, if they added it, it probably was for a good reason, or high requests from users. But it's actually broken, and thus, the only option worse than pool 1..

Got some spare BTC, throw em my way: 1BKiPfKw9tu9ky9WCNHrShQYvz1zBD7zMt

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

ZetaCoin (ZET) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

No Premine
Based on Bitcoin 0.9.2.1 source
Block target: 30 seconds (20x Faster than Bitcoin)
Difficulty re-targets every 4 blocks based on last 90 blocks (Quick difficulty readjustment)
Block reward: 1000 ZET, halving every 80640 blocks (about 1 month), not dropping below 1 ZET (inflationary)
Total coin supply:160 million ZET + small yearly inflation
160 million coins will be mined in around first year
Thereafter around 1 million per year (inflationary). This small inflation is a better incentive to keep the network hashing than purely transaction fees.
P2P port: 17333

Coin's Website:

http://zetacoin.com/

Forums:

BitCoinTalk

Exchanges:

Social Media:

Pools:

Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is this coin needs some support! It can be a good coin, it's only worth 1 coin / block but at the rate you can find them and the speed they are sent/received when the network is active it can be almost instantaneous. It's quite unfortunate that there isn't more of an active mining network. All pools provide near identical results, they all have different reasons for lower hashrates but you essentially get the same result in the end. Between 350-450 coins per TH/s a day. If you can solo mine that is the way to go, but otherwise just pick a pool that has the most users, doesn't get interfered with by a multi-pool switch, and ride it out. At the current exchange of 0.00000492/BTC it is not currently profitable but it was at one point already and can be again in the future. This isn't one to just look over and forget about.

#1 MultiPool.us:

Pool Hashrate: 1.3-2 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.3-2 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 1032 ZET
Fees: 1.5%
Average Round Duration: ~1 minute
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: Very stable, no real issues here besides the fluctuating hash-rate, but all pools seemed to experience that with this coin, at least this one stuck towards the 2 TH/s side of things and payed out much better!

#2 MiningPools:

Pool Hashrate: 2 TH/s
My Hashrate: 2 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 952
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: ~1 Minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: As usual MiningPools provides a quite stable environment, sticking right at 2 TH/s for my whole test. Still just basically solo mining though.

#3 E-Pool:

Pool Hashrate: 1.6-4.8 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.3-1.5 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 840 ZET
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: ~1 minute
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: This pool pays out very quickly and shows up as direct mining, but it's just not very reliable at the moment as it operates as a p2p setup with only 2 nodes. But it does pay out more or less the same as the others.

#4 TomPool:

Pool Hashrate: 1.8-2.5TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.3-2TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 816 ZET (Estimated was 1000+ at 2 TH/s)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: ~1 minute
Reward Method: PPS
My Thoughts: I had a constant 10% DOA rate this server and stuck around 1.8 TH/s. And since it's a PPS pay structure it can pay out much better! People coming and going from this pool only helps your situation.

#5 Multi-Pool.info:

Pool Hashrate: 1.3-1.8 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.3-1.8 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 727 ZET (Estimated was 1400+ at 2 TH/s)
Fees: 1.75%
Average Round Duration: ~1 minute
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: My hashrate was lowered due to the DOA's, they were on average 25%. But that didn't seem to effect my coin intake too badly in comparison.

#6 CoinKing:

Pool Hashrate: 1-4 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-2 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 712 ZET
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: ~2 minute
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: Some people came and went throughout my testing but for the most part I was solo mining. I actually had a low DOA and Orphan rate (2%) but didn't earn more on this because my hash-rate kept dropping towards the 1 TH/s side of things more than the 2 TH/s.

#7 SecurePayments:

Pool Hashrate: 1-4 TH/s
My Hashrate: 0.5-2 TH/s
24 Hour Earnings: 698 ZET
Fees: 3%
Average Round Duration: ~1 minute
Reward Method: 97% to the finder
My Thoughts: There was one other user there with the same hash-rate as me, also fluctuating quite wildly. We were basically catching blocks on a 1:1 ratio as well, each of us getting a block every other minute. There was a high orphan rate here, between 5-15% and a bad hashrate on top of it.

Got some spare ZET, throw em my way: ZL288MkV99vd986yn2NTuSQEDJdpMAo2ou

Sunday, February 8, 2015

Open Source Coin (OSC) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

Algorithm: Sha256 POW/POS
1 year stake
Total Coins: 21 million
Subsidy: .0777 - 22.5 coins
Halving: 400,000 blocks
Minimum Subsidy: .0777
Block Times: 2.5 minutes
Re-target: Static/SSDRA

Coin's Website:

GitHub Repository

Forums:

BitcoinTalk

Exchanges:

Pools:

Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is that you just can't beat solo mining this coin. Even if you are just by yourself on a good pool it is better than a bigger one with a worse hash-rate. Coinwars profitability calculator keeps saying that you can earn up to 16,000+ coins/day with with my Antminer S4!? Just Absurd! Clearly that is not the case.. This coin may be profitable if you invest your earnings from BTC and play the market, but not for mining directly. And a 1 year stake to earn interest, that's asking way too much of people, other POS coins usually have a 90 day max on minting (where interest starts being payed at 30 days and ends at 90 with max maturity).

MiningPools:

Pool Hashrate:1.8-2.5 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.8-2.5 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 8,100 OSC
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 2 Minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: Basically solo mining since there were no other miners, but I did receive a good hash-rate and very little orphans or DOA's.

iSpace:

Pool Hashrate: 1-75TH/s (a few times their main pool hit it)
My Hashrate: 1-3TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 5,986 OSC
Fees: 0%
Average Round Duration: 2 Minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: This server has become slower and slower over past weeks, the number of users sure has grown but the payout/work ratio seems skewed on EVERY coin I test there, maybe they have it weighted to payout more to the multi-pool users but I don't see it when I mine on them either, most of their multi-pools switch too quickly to find enough blocks on a coin and when they barge in on a coin you've been dedicated mining they kill all your hard work and reap the benefits. It seems to me like the person winning here is iSpace.

TomPool:

Pool Hashrate: 5-6.8TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.2-2TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: would have been 4,080 OSC (suggested 18,000 Coins at 2TH/s)
Fees:1%
Average Round Duration: 25 seconds
Reward Method: PPS
My Thoughts: 50% Orphan rate, had to abort after 4 hours and no end in sight.

Got some spare OSC, throw em my way: 2B1XBMxhaVQg8qBe3kz5AozNaYm2gevBtJ

Saturday, February 7, 2015

TEKcoin (TEK) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

Sha256 Proof of work/Proof of Stake
SuperStake Eco-Minting: mint up to 40% interest on your TEKcoin balance after every 30+ days.
1 minute per block.
1 coin per block.
Unlimited coins.
No block halving.
No IPO.
No BS.
1440 PoW coins per day.

Coin's Website:

http://tekcoin.org/

Forums:

BitcoinTalk

Exchanges:

Social Media:

Twitter

Pools:

Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is that this coin is not profitable at the exchange rate of 0.00001952/BTC unless you have some super efficient server setup, something in the .4W/GH range. The best result I got was basically solo mining, but that was still two times less profitable than BTC mining. I do like the ideas behind this one and until mining become profitable show support by investing in the TEKcoin by trading for now, and of course run the wallet which will earn "interest" for held coins. (I have held onto a couple thousand after testing this and will update after 30 days with the results)

MiningPools:

Pool Hashrate: 2-2.5 TH/s
My Hashrate: 2-2.5 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 628 TEK
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 2 Minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: I was basically solo mining like on SecurePayments but with less money being taking out since it is a regular pool and there was nobody else there. I got a great hash-rate with a max 10k difficulty and it was processing without issues for being too large like with SecurePayments. Average recorded by my antminer was 2.2 TH/s.

SecurePayments (SOLO):

Pool Hashrate: 2.3-2.8 TH/s
My Hashrate: 2-2.5 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 442 TEK
Fees: 3%
Average Round Duration: 3 Minutes
Reward Method: 97% of reward goes to the finder
My Thoughts: This is basically solo mining in a pool environment, can be a great success if you have enough power and the coin is worth enough. Difficulty was going up to 20k and was causing weird hash-rates reported by the pool, but my recorded average was still 2 TH/s on my antminer dashboard. But due to the high difficulty there were a lot stale/DOA's and subsequently a large amount of orphaned blocks, basically causing a payout 30% less than I should have received.

iSpace:

Pool Hashrate: 3-4 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.4-2.4 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 420 TEK
Fees: 0%
Average Round Duration: 3 minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: Despite having earned 720 blocks myself, I was only paid 420!? This pool network is looking more corrupt every-time I test on it. No fees, but a whole lot of missing coins in my opinion! Guess it's a forced donation.. to them or other miners providing nothing.

HamsterPool:

Pool Hashrate: 1.8-2.8 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.5-2.5 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 296 (Estimated ~750 TEK at 2 TH/s)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 5 Minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: There were only 3 other miners with very low hash-rates on the pool and they literally found 1 block for every 100 I did. And my hash-rate seemed to hover in the 1.7 TH/s range, so basically 500 GH/s below my normal hash-rate on a BTC pool.

Got some spare TEK, throw em my way: BhhSYDz4jUWGjmRTju5Ax5wtxahHfUbMWf

DigitalCoin (DGC) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

Algorithm - Scrypt, x11, SHA256
Confirmations - Confirmations average 40 seconds
Mining Reward - 5 per block found. Rewards encourage miners to support the network long term
Maximum coins - ~ 48,166,000 coins will be minted

Coin's Website:

http://digitalcoin.co

Forums:

Exchanges:

Social Media:

Pools

Scrypt :

Xpool

SHA256 :

X11 :

CryptoPools
Mining.WTF

SHA256 Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is that this coin is not profitable on any pool or solo mining, at 0.00002888/BTC it produces at least 2 times less than BTC mining, if your energy efficiency is worse than .75W/GH it will lose you a lot of money. If the coin grows into such a market then it will be a different story. But there are numerous ways to mine this coin which is probably why it get's such poor performance and crazy long lasting periods of difficulty.

#1 Hashlink:

Pool Hashrate: 1.2-4.2 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-4 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 420 DGC (Estimated was 600+ at 2 TH/s)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 3-10 Minutes
Reward Method: PPS
My Thoughts: Their US high diff servers have been down so this testing was done on the UK Server, if the US one was functional this would have been more towards the 600 DGC promised, but after seeing the network performance sway in such drastic manors I feel even this high of an output was a fluke.

#2 CryptoPools:

Pool Hashrate: 4-5 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-2TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: Would have been 198 (Estimated was 900+ at 2 TH/s)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 5 minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: They do have a high diff server, use port 13350 for over 1024 difficulty, but I was getting 30%+ DOA dropping my hash-rate closer to the 1 TH/s range so I switched back to the low diff server which basically eliminated the DOA rate and my efficiency rose but it was struggling to maintain a good hash-rate, even one that was any better than the high diff issue. Aborted testing after 6 hours with no end of this issue in sight.

#3 MiningPools:

Pool Hashrate: 1-2 TH/s
My Hashrate:1-2 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 118 DGC
Fees:1%
Average Round Duration: 30-360 minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: Half of the time I would get 2 blocks per hour then the other half I would literally get nothing for hours upon hours. This coin has such a fluctuating difficulty, I assume due to the numerous algorithms you can use to mine it, that the difficulty can go sideways at a moments notice and stay that way for hours.

#4 MiningWTF:

Pool Hashrate: 5-6 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-2 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: Would have been 32 DGC (Estimated was 180-900 for 2 TH/s, never seen such a range for the same hash-rate)
Fees:1%
Average Round Duration: 15 minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: Aborted testing after 6 hours and only earning 8 DGC! Just awful performance from their serer and ever worse payouts for the hash-rate. This coin clearly has issues with reliability.

Got some spare DGC, throw em my way: DE9qFz6pd4Quggfh6dawmhT7tSbDpVcyhW

Friday, February 6, 2015

TitCoin (TIT) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

Algorithm: SHA-256
Block Reward: 69 coins
Block Time: 1 minutes (60 seconds)
Total Coins: 69,000,000
Retarget: Every block (DigiShield)
Halving Interval: 500,000 blocks
P2P/RPC Port: 8698/8697

Coin's Website:

Forums:

BitcoinTalk

Exchanges:

Social Media:

Pools:

Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is that if the coin were worth more it would be profitable, at the current exchange if 0.00000298/BTC you earn roughly half of BTC mining. If the coin picks up more users that will also be different, but the network strength is poor and only supported by about 15 TH/s of dedicated users plus another 100 TH/s that are running on multi-pools, but that hashing power is sporadic at best and can't be a backbone for any coin. At the moment, and depending on your hash power, solo mining would be your most profitable option as you can earn more than double what I was pulling off in a pool.

#1 CoinKing:

Pool Hashrate: 3-15 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.2-2.5 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 4,216 TIT
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 30 (or ~5 minutes when the multi-pool switches)
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: This pool is also a multi-pool which has it's minor advantages as when the pool comes so does a great chunk of blocks, but their server takes a huge difficulty hit when this occurs and my hash-rate drops in half. CoinKing let's you manually set difficulty per worker, which is fantastic, except when their multi-pool changes the network hash-rate difficulty for everyone and a locked in 2k diff is like 10k diff, you get a load of stales and there goes your hash-rate, multi-pools need a variable difficulty per worker for this reason. But when the multi-pool leaves it returns to normal. And since it's PPLNS you still reap the rewards more than the hoppers. My miner only said it found 2 blocks and the pool barely shows 1 an hour, but the amount of money being deposited suggests otherwise. This coin has a hard time reporting that it's found a block for some reason, but it does pay out the reward regardless. Their dashboard graph does monitor your output and show the full hash-rate when you put your mouse over it, just not sure why it says 2.5G on the left.

#2 Hashlink Pool:

Pool Hashrate: 1-2 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-2 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings:4,120 TIT (Suggested was 8,000+ TIT for 2TH/s)
Fees: 0%
Average Round Duration: 30 Minutes
Reward Method:PPLNS
My Thoughts: There is supposed to be High Diff server but I was only able to connect to the low diff server which maxes out at 1024 difficulty, this would easily be #1 on the list if the other server was up and running. It barely lost out to CoinKing.

#3 Ispace:

Pool Hashrate: 6-8 TH/s (up to 75 TH/s when the multi-pool hits)
My Hashrate: 1-3TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 2,822
Fees: 0%
Average Round Duration: 6 Minutes (or ~30 seconds when 75 TH/s hits)
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: This is a multi-pool with a lot of users and this coin is on one of their rotating multi-pools: The "Five" Pool rotates between a set of 5 coins every 2 hours. So every 2 hours there is a burst of power that throws several blocks at once into the mix. This actually pays out nicely for people who just stay on one coin, thanks to the PPLNS reward structure you will get more than the hoppers, generally a lot more. But this pool still doesn't pay out well in comparison to others or just solo mining for some reason.

#4 MinerPools:

Pool Hashrate: 1.4-2.5TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-2.1 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 2,484 TIT
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 30 minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: This coin in general seems to have a hard time achieving a proper hash rate, but I at least did get up to 2.1 TH/s with this server and it held for a while in comparison to previous tests on other pools. I did suffer from a fluctuating DOA rate, which was up to 25% at times and was the reason for the lower hash-rates. On a plus: this is one of the only pools that my miner actually showed I found the blocks every-time.

#5 SlugMonkey:

Pool Hashrate: 3TH/s
My Hashrate .05-1.5 TH/s (Yes 50 GH/s - 1.5 TH/s)
My 24 Hour Earnings: Would have been 368 TIT but performance was so bad I abandoned this server after 6 hours.
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 10 Minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: Unless you have a low hash-rate just stay away from this one.Whatever they are using for a server is clearly not enough for any real amount of power. The misspelled warning message at the top isn't a good sign either: "Thay" LOL.. And almost everything Is Capitalized. :)

#6 MuPool:

Pool Hashrate: 240 GH/s
My Hashrate: 240 GH/s (95% DOA Rate)
My 24 Hour Earnings: 48 TIT if I would have stayed, pool performance was absolutely abysmal, aborted testing on server after 4 hours.
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 48 Hours
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: This is a decentralized p2p pool and those are notoriously unstable, but this is really the worst I have seen. If you can set up your own node to curb the poor performance it would be one thing, but as is, there is no hope for this network.

Got some spare TIT, throw em my way: 12R5ux74uYDu2UMaX2G7VJgpiK8X4qB5MA

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Ham Radio Coin (HAM) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

SHA256D Proof of Work based on Bitcoin 0.8.99
21,000,000 Total Coins
50 coins per block; halving every 50,000 blocks
3 minute block intervals
10 block difficulty adjustments
Premined 10%
RPC Port: 15538
P2P Port: 15537

Coin's Website:

http://hamradiocoin.com/

Forums:

http://hamradiocoin.com/forum

Social Media:

Exchanges:

Pools:

Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed by an Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218 Mhz) and my conclusion is that it is possible to earn a profit from this coin in a pool environment, but at the current exchange rate 0.00001010 it is slightly more profitable to run BTC mining, but only just. And if you run in solo environment where you don't have fluctuating hash-rates it can be greater, the difficulty is quite low for this coin.

#1 MiningPools

Pool Hashrate: 3 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.5-2.5 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 2,347 HAM
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 23 Minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: This option can provide the best results, unfortunately the pool server is quite unstable. There was only one other worker with 500 GH/s power and there were major variations in hashrate power, and not in the same over-power fashion like the other pools were showing. I was lucky to have 2TH/s for half the time. If you can solo mine this coin it is the best option, but that requires a stratum server for network miners or usb connected ASIC hardware, so this is the next best thing at the moment. This pool returns the biggest profit, if only barely, but most pools returned basically the same results the only difference was how many other users are taking profit.

#2 Hashlink

Pool Hashrate: 10 TH/s
My Hashrate: 2-3 TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 2,110 HAM (Suggested was 1,402 HAM)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 6 Minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts. I provided at least 25% of the blocks for the pool during testing so solo mining would still be more cost effective. And for having basically the entire network strength at this pool it wasn't providing a greater return, just spreading out the coins to all the users, less powerful users reaping the reward of 2 or 3 people with 2TH/s or more at their disposal.

#3 CoinKing:

Pool Hashrate: 2-4TH/s
My Hashrate: 2-4TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 1,876 HAM
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration:18 Minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: As you can see from the picture below I was basically solo mining on this pool, some came and went, but due to the network difficulty being so low I still did turn out a good amount of coins, unfortunately it's still just half of what I would have earned BTC mining (at the current exchange of 0.00000931).

#4 Ispace:

Pool Hashrate: 3-5 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1-3TH/s
My 24 Hour Earnings: 1,285 HAM
Fees: 0%
Average Round Duration: 10 Minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My Thoughts: For some reason this pool just doesn't pay out well, I got just as many blocks (86 in a 24 hour period) as I did on other pools but yet I received basically 1/4 of what I would get doing it SOLO and almost half of what any other pool provides.

Got some spare HAM, throw em my way: 1Aak4M9qsV88Mgpp2fUQ7UDYqF3XDADfvK

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

MazaCoin (MZC) SHA256 Pool Testing and Coin Information

Detailed Coin Information:

Name: MazaCoin
Symbol: MZC
Algorithm: SHA256 POW
Block time: 2 minutes
Reward Value: Currently 1,000
Halving: every 950,000 blocks
Total supply: 2.4192 billion in approx 18 years
P2P Port: 12835
RPC Port: 12832

Coin's Website:

http://mazacoin.org/

Forums:

http://forum.mazatalk.com/

Exchanges:

Pools:

Active Pool Comparison

All testing performed with Antminer S4 @ 2.18 TH/s (218Mhz) and my conclusion is that there is a great variation in pool speed and surprisingly solo mining this coin was not cost effective, the diffulty was just great enough that pooling is required even for 2 TH/s. And since the coin is worth 0.00000131/BTC at the moment you technically turn a profit over energy cost, as long as your miner is .75W/GH or better in efficiency that is. If the coin grows in popularity so will the profit, this one looks promising!

#1 CryptoADHD

Pool Hashrate: 10 TH/s
My Hashrate: 1.8 TH/s Average
My 24 Hour Earnings: 21,505 MZC (estimated was 20,000-28,000 MZC)
Fees: 1%
Average Round Duration: 15 Minutes
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: This pool takes a long time to adjust to your hash-rate, my miner was stuck working on difficulty 32 for nearly an hour before finally getting 2.05k (which is still low) once that happened my hash-rate when from 1.5 TH/s to over 2 TH/s and was finally reporting correctly on the dashboard. But I still had a large amount of invalids, it went up to 5% actually, and that was almost all the invalids for the entire pool and making my hash-rate lower than other MZC pools. But since it finds so many blocks compared to other pools it is still more profitable, just as long as there's no downtime or connections issues, but I had periods where it didn't submit work or all the work was stale. All in all I profited from this pool even with the weak exchange, and earned almost as much as BTC mining, so it's definately the winner!

#2 HamsterPool

Pool Hashrate: 3TH/s (mine being more than 2TH/s of that)
My Hashrate: 2.2 TH/s Average (4 TH/s Burst)
My 24 Hour Earnings: 12,208 MZC
Fees: 1.5%
Average Round Duration: 2 Hours
Reward Method: PPLNS
My Thoughts: It suggested I would make 12,000 coins a day and it was dead on. This pool had very little fluctuation and was quite stable. Probably the best pool for this coin but not enough users and unfortunately the coin needs to double in value before it is actually profitable with such a low hashrate. I found 12/13 blocks myself. I could only imaging how well this pool can do with some real effort behind it!

#3 Ispace Pool:

Pool Hashrate: 10 TH/s - 75TH/s (Ispace is a multipool site and has massively fluctuating hash-rates, you can choose to stay on a specific pool though)
My Hashrate: 2.1TH/s on average (4 TH/s Burst)
My 24 Hour Earnings: 12,555 MZC (was more than double that when pool was at 75TH/s)
Fees: 0%
Average Round Duration: 20 minutes
Reward Method: PROP
My thoughts: All your hard work get's killed when one of their multi-pools comes around, since it's proportional it's really hard to earn coins unless you follow the multi-pools, and it still seems like less than if I just chose a coin on another dedicated pool.

#4 Secure Payments.cc Solo Mining

Pool Hashrate: This is not technically a pool, but it does function in the same manor, as in there are numerous people connected working to solve a block, but the one who finds it get's 97% of the reward. Currently there was only 3 TH/s and that was nearly 75% my antminer s4.
My Hashrate: 2.2 TH/s Average (4 TH/s burst)
My 24 Hour Earnings: 1,900 MZC (2 blocks found - pool cost)
Fees: 5%
Average round duration: 12 hours.
Reward Method: 95% of the block reward to the finder.
My thoughts: This coin doesn't seem to be profitable for solo mining especially at today's market, or maybe this "pool" is majorly unlucky on this coin. I have had great success with other solo runs on their site. What makes less sense is that I had the same pool hash-rate on Hamsterpool and I was finding a block every other hour. But that's just the way the ball bounces sometimes.

Got some spare MZC, throw em my way: MCXVRpU5tgyG2HVtLJq7h8Ae1hfSBQ7SgR

Sunday, February 1, 2015

SpreadCoin (SPR) X11 Coin Testing and Information

This is a great coin that's just a little over a year old and it has one key advantage, that being there is no pool mining available. The only way to mine is to have your own wallet setup and to use your own hashing power. Since no pools are allowed this means almost no fluctuation in the market on a daily basis especially caused by pool hopping / multi-pools. This has lead to a very stable coin market with a more stable growth pattern.

I tested this coin with my EVGA 780 SC running at 1136Mhz and it provided a stable 3Mh/s which led to me finding 1 block per day. This doesn't sound like much but at today's exchange rate it actually provides a profit on GPU mining!

Operating costs of the 780 are on average $0.0036/day at 150 watts and $.1/kwh basically equates to $0.17 cents/day profit at today's market value of $230/BTC. It definitely does make money that's for sure and that's a rare thing in GPU mining. But it's just not that much unless you have some insane power behind you!

Detailed Coin Information:

Algorithm: SpreadX11
Block generation: 1 minute
Difficulty re-targets: every block based on last 360 blocks
Reward starts at approximately 6.66 coins per block
Block reward is smoothly halved every 4 years
Total supply: 20 milllion coins
No year 2106 problem

Coin's Website:

Forums:

Exchanges:

Mining Guide:

GitHub

Got some spare SPR, throw em my way: SeCUSvDmaHpEBPny7BWGuNCynDe6eDLAP9

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Profiting From Renting Bitcoin Mining Rigs

I have been experimenting with renting mining rigs and have come to a pleasant outcome. And have found it to be much more profitable than buying your own equipment and running the risk of miner failure, plus you don't have to worry about fluctuations in power consumption or the cost of electricity.

I did all of my testing on Mining Rig Rentals and found that they not only have a great setup, but some of the best support around. If you have an issue with your rental there, refunds are given. Owners of mining equipment set a hash rate that must be achieved, they say in their TOS that you understand there are fluctuations in mining power but anything outside the normal is refunded, as well as all outages. At the end of a rental you are given an output percentage which is calculated by submitted shares and anything outside that given fluctuation is refunded. Also if a rig goes down for 20/30 minutes after renting it is immediately refunded.
The price for a rental varies greatly as the mining equipment has drastically changed over the past year, literally doubling to tripling in power efficiency. So don't just rent whatever shows up on page one. Currently the best price per megahash/day is 0.000000011, which if translated to TH is .011 BTC /day and the list of rentals can be easily sorted and filtered.
Calculating the cost for a TH/day at .011 BTC you will earn .004 BTC/day per TH/s on your average pool by itself, but I have come to find that on some pools (like AntPool SOLO) you can earn up to .03 BTC/Day which gives you a total profit of .019 BTC/Day per rented TH/s! And when combined with even more power these figures can grow exponentially! Of course this is an average, you can't expect results for mining and reaping full scale rewards on a daily basis! Some days have no luck while the next day can make up for in in spades.
If you don't want to risk the reward (this is what I recommend) on a PPLNS pool like AntPool there are others that operate in a PPS manner, as in it doesn't calculate your reward based on found blocks, but it evenly gives you a reward based on your work provided regardless of whether a block is found or not. There are few that operate in this manor but for way less risk you can safely earn a steady profit of .003 btc/day per TH/s but the payouts can be more random, if they don't find a block for a while their funding wallet can't payout and multiple found blocks may be required to pay out the shares, but they will come and in full. Bitcoin Affiliate Network has the most stable PPS pool available and generally has a 2PH/s pool which finds an average of 2 blocks/day.
Below is an example of the output graph, you not only get this for every rental but you can also hook up your own equipment to their servers without letting it be rented and you can track and monitor it's progress and quickly notice any faults or strange pool behavior.