My experience after NiceHash went down, trying to mine coins directly. First coin mined: MONA

For “too long; didn't read” version - skip to entry at 4:45 AM.

After Nicehash went down, I have decided to try and mine coins directly following whattomine.com as a guide on most profitable coins currently.
That's because most places where I have read about an alternative to NiceHash were indicating that profits are almost cut in half, so why not try and follow same rules when it comes to mining as NiceHash?

Sharing this as I am hoping it would help someone else out there, or maybe you could learn from my mistakes. (please point them out)

When I started testing this, on whattomine.com, MONA coin was most profitable to mine, showing a profit of about CAD 70 / day. (Vertcoin was showing same profits.)

What I have in mind is to try and configure everything for as many as possible, then eventually it will just be a few clicks to switch to a different one when whattomine.com shows another coin would be better to mine.
A friend suggested https://www.smartmine.org/, which seems to be an amazing tool for my purposes, it would switch automatically to most profitable coin reported on whattomine.com, but still allows to mine the coin directly, allowing me to decide when and where I want to sell it. Since it is in beta and I already mined 24 hrs on MONA coin, I will finish this test.

My miners - first one back in July, second one started mining Nov 30th.

Miner 1 - Total cost CAD 5959
7 x ZOTAC Geforce GTX 1070 8GB Mini edition
1 x MSI Geforce GTX 1070 8GB Gaming X edition
EVGA SuperNOVA 1300 G2 1300W 80Plus Gold PSU
ASUS PRIME Z270-A ATX Motherboard + m.2 to PCIe adapter card

Miner 2 - Total cost CAD 4481
7 x ZOTAC Geforce GTX 1070 8GB Mini edition
EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G1, 80+ GOLD 1000W PSU
ASUS PRIME H270-PLUS/CSM Socket 1151 Motherboard

From the most recent history right before NiceHash went down, my miners were working for 6 days, last updated balance was showing CAD 304, Dec 6th at 2:00 AM - RIP NiceHash. So that`s about CAD 50 / day.

Lets see if I can get the same profit by mining coins directly instead of using an automated software that switches.

Setting up to mine MONAcoin was pretty easy.

I will skip the steps that were already done for NiceHash - I used this tutorial to setup my miners: http://1stminingrig.com/best-windows-setup-configuration-tweaks-for-mining/
Up to the step where you install GPU drivers, I installed Nvidia ones.

After researching what miner to use, what pool, what wallet, how easy it is to cash out and all that, I started setting up for mining MONA coin.
For an easy step-by-step video tutorial see this video, I used a different wallet then suggest there I believe:

Signup for an account at https://mona.suprnova.cc/ - this is the pool.
Add your miner/s to the pool, you will need your username / miner name and password to configure the miner.
Found Android Wallet app to cash out - Coinomi, has ShapeShift to convert to multiple coins - other option is to send to Bittrex exchange and sell for Bitcoin.
Download miner from ccminer.org.
Configure miner to mine MONA - all details are on pool page after you added your miners.
Launch miner and wait.

I mined MONAcoin for 24 hours - earnings page shows balance: 2.61424375

When I go to withdraw, shows account balance: 2.3465204

So, if the fee is 0.01 MONA for transaction, I should have about 2.6 avail to withdraw still?
Anyways, moving on, let's find a solution on how to cash this out...

Option one - CAD 38
If I send it from Suprnova pool to Bittrex, then sell it for BTC then send to QuadrigaCX and sell, I get CAD 38 minus the transfer fees from Bittrex to Quadriga for the BTC, then selling the BTC on Quadriga.
*On Bittrex you can exchange Monacoin against BTC only.

Option two - CAD 38.76
I send the Monacoins from pool to android wallet - Coinomi, which has ShapeShift integrated to convert the Monacoin to Litecoin - would give me 0.34 LTC. If I sell that at Quadriga I would get CAD 38.76, again, minus the transfer fees.
Using different currency to trade from Monacoin and sell at Quadriga:
Ethereum: 0.068 ETH would give me CAD 34.47
If I would have minimum required for BTC, 2.8 MONA = about CAD 20 worth of BTC ???
I could shapeshift it to SALT coin, get 4 SALT coins, get salty and then go play CS:GO (that would actually give me about CAD 32)

Going with option two - LTC.
Transferring MONA from pool to android wallet - just seeing now that balance on cashout page is 2.57 MONA - I guess it took a while to make all the coins available for cashout…
2:58 AM - Got distracted for about 10 minutes, refreshed page to cashout, balance is now 2.58. I guess I`ll give it more time.
3:32 AM - Got back to check, cashout page shows now 2.61424375 - Finally the full amount!
3:35 AM ish - Clicked to send the amount to my android wallet, got a pop-up saying something like “manual transaction with ID XXXXXXX created”, it dissapeared in 2 seconds, didnt get a chance to write anything down or copy, no I can't find what happened in the account.
3:36 AM - balance on pool shows 0, my android MONA wallet shows the transaction incoming pending for 2.6 MONA, waiting confirmation.
3:40 AM - Coinomi android wallet shows balance of 2.6 MONA = CAD 52 … how??? How do I get that amount?

4:19 AM - tired of reading about Coinomi, decided to use their integrated shapeshift and convert the MONAcoins to LITEcoins.

Tried a bunch of times, with different amounts, different coins, kept getting same error.

4:27 AM - Decided to try and send it to my Bittrex exchange wallet and sell it from there.

4:30 AM - Bittrex shows Pending deposit of 2.60324375 MONA

4:45 AM - Bittrex shows full amount deposited, Estimated BTC value of 0.00239251 - worth almost 46$ at Quadriga.

4:53 AM - It's worth 0.00240675 BTC. Decided to give it some time.
At the time when I decided to mine MONAcoin, it was the most profitable on whattomine.com - Dec 6th, around 9 PM. then I started mining 3 hours later, Dec 7th 12:00 AM, for 24 hours. My 2.6 MONA would be worth 0.00338 BTC, which at the time was about CAD 70, with BTC price at CAD 21000.
In conclusion, I personally think that there is potential to actually get very close to the indicated profit on whattomine.com, but that requires monitoring the price and selling the coin that I mined when the price is back to what it was at the time of checking whattomine.com.
I guess I`ll try and wait for MONA to get close to same value in BTC.
Hopefully, over time, this process would take only a few minutes each day once all the mining options are set for each coin that I mine and I have all the wallets setup, figure out how to cash each coin out, etc.

5:29 AM - After checking price charts and getting a headache I decided to put thru an order at Bittrex:

At CAD 20.000 / BTC that would be worth about CAD 68 at Quadriga.
Pretty close to whattomine.com`s prediction, CAD 70/day, if only price would go back up.
We will see what happens…

In the meantime, I am mining ethereum, please feel free to suggest any other coin that you would like me to test.

Hope this helps someone, thank you for reading.

UPDATE
December 11th, 6PM EST - traded the MONA to BTC, then somehow run into a coin that seems ok short term, I will keep for few days to see if I can increase the profit for these 24 hours.

In the meantime, I started mining Electroneum. So far it seems to be twice as profitable compared to NiceHash. It hasnt been 24 hours yet but I will try and report back maybe in a new post about the whole experience.

http://electroneum.com/
Miner used: https://github.com/KlausT/ccminer-cryptonight/releases/download/2.06/ccminer-cryptonight-206-x64-cuda9.zip
Pool: http://www.electroneum.space