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

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.
  
  
  

Bitcoin Mining Pool Comparison

This is my comparison of the most active bitcoin mining pools out there, I did this test with my AntMiner S4 (2 TH/s) SHA256 ASIC Miner running @ 218 Mhz (+18 Mhz, %9 OverClocked) and for a period of 1 week:

BTC Guild

• Pool Hashrate: 14,000 TH/s 
• My Hashrate: up to 2.1 TH/s
• My 24 Hour Average: .025 BTC
• Fees: BTC Guild deducts a 2% fee from total reward of any block reward. The remaining 98% is credited to site users under the Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) method. Information on how this method works is available in the support section. Amounts shown on your dashboard have already had the fee deducted. Orphaned blocks are not credited.
• Security: Standard Login Protocol, SSL Security. Ability to lock bitcoin wallet address so no changes can be made.
• Average Round Duration: 180 Minutes
• Reward Method: Pay Per Last N Groups (or shifts). Similar to PPLNS, but shares are grouped into "shifts" which are paid as a whole.
• My thoughts: Don't waste your time here, it's not very profitable as their fees suck up a 2% and then the payouts seem to be weak by comparison, especially if you do the math yourself. So unless ranking is what you're after that's the only unique feature this pool has, teams and rankings. But no way to find users, so pointless. Payouts are done at a BTC value of your choosing, fees for less than .01 BTC.

Slush's Pool

• Pool Hashrate: 10,000 TH/s
• My Hashrate: up to 2.25 TH/s
• My 24 Hour Average: .035 BTC
• Fees: Pool fee is 2% (calculated from block reward and transaction fees). Fees from bitcoin transactions are paid to miners that are using Stratum interface. An active hashrate gives you a score based on participation.
• Security: Extra Secure 2 Factor Login Protocol, SSL Security.
• Average Round Duration: 240 Minutes
• Reward Method: Score based system: a proportional reward, but weighed by time submitted. Each submitted share is worth more in the function of time t since start of current round. For each share score is updated by: score += exp(t/C). This makes later shares worth much more than earlier shares, thus the miner's score quickly diminishes when they stop mining on the pool. Rewards are calculated proportionally to scores (and not to shares). (at slush's pool C=300 seconds, and every hour scores are normalized)
• My thoughts: This was the first and longest running pool on the internet and you can tell why. The scoring hash-rate fluctuates based on your activity, so this feature heavily benefits long term miners, if you come and go you will not score/earn well.  It has a user driver suggestion feature that allows you to vote and depending on your hash rate is how much your vote is worth. New features being added all the time and this is the most stable and user friendly mining experience I had, if the pool hashrate jumps a little more it will be just as profitable as BTC China. Payouts are done at a BTC value of your choosing, fees for less than .01 BTC.

BTC China

• Pool Hashrate: 18,000 TH/s
• My Hashrate: up to 2.5 TH/s
• My 24 Hour Average: .025 BTC/day
• Fees: 0% Pool fees.
• Security: Standard Login Protocol, SSL Security.
• Average Round Duration: 60 Minutes
• Reward Method: Score based, similar to slush's pool.
• My thoughts: The pool's site is not in English so an in-browser translator is needed to make use of this pool (like google translator). It does have details statistics and graphs just like slush's pool, but is glitchy and has long page load times so it can be frustrating at times. But it does squeak by with more payouts, so as long as you don't care about monitoring this is the best bet for you. Site has 2 daily payouts to the wallet account of your choosing (if it is above a .01 BTC) or to their own currency exchange and pay system. 

Ghash.io

• Pool Hashrate: 50,000 TH/s 
• My Hashrate: up to 2.25 TH/s
• My 24 Hour Average: .025 BTC
• Fees: 0% Pool fees.
• Security: Extra Secure 2 Factor Login Protocol, SSL Security. (although the 2FA doesn't show up all the time)
• Average Round Duration: 45 Minutes
• Reward Method: For SHA-256 and scrypt mining GHash.IO relies on PPLNS (“Pay per last N shares”), a reward distribution system, according to which the compensation is given out to shares in an opening beginning with the last registered share going backwards up to a certain number of shares. Shares outside of the opening are not being compensated. Shares are considered to be hashes smaller than the target for difficulty 1. Every hash has the possibility of being a valid share, which equals to 1 in 232. For the reason of gaining a more dispersed and predictable sequence, miners group into pools. In the end, miners are rewarded with coins according to their shares.
• My thoughts: Very large number of stale and rejects. Probably due to the large number of users, but even when I found a faster server it was still producing 25% stale returns, which means you don't get credit. So my active hashrate of 2.25 TH/s was always below 2 TH/s and on some servers was knocked down to just over 1 TH/s! So unless you have massive amounts of power at your disposal this will not be a good investment of your time.

AntPool

• Pool Hashrate: 35,000 TH/s 
• My Hashrate: up to 2.25 TH/s
• My 24 Hour Average: .04 BTC
• Fees: 0% Pool fees.
• Security: Extra Secure 2 Factor Login Protocol, SSL Security. (2FA only shows up when editing settings)
• Average Round Duration: 90 Minutes
• Reward Method: For SHA-256 relies on PPLNS (“Pay per last N shares”), a reward distribution system, according to which the compensation is given out to shares in an opening beginning with the last registered share going backwards up to a certain number of shares. Shares outside of the opening are not being compensated. Shares are considered to be hashes smaller than the target for difficulty 1. Every hash has the possibility of being a valid share, which equals to 1 in 232. For the reason of gaining a more dispersed and predictable sequence, miners group into pools. In the end, miners are rewarded with coins according to their shares.
• My thoughts: Quite possibly the best pool around, for a pool that has more powerful competition it regularly brings in 15 blocks a day and I have seen up to 30! I have had the most success in this pool and it has servers located all over the world as well as a p2p setup in addition to their main pool, the p2p has drastically different payouts as there is a much lower pool turnout. But their main "SOLO" pool is a money maker!

*Ongoing list to be updated and not in any order of ranking or preference.

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