Crypto Coin Man: Scrypt

Saturday, February 7, 2015

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

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.