Don't Bother Mining Ethereum, Mine Low Difficulty Altcoins

in writing •  8 years ago  (edited)

ethereum.png

If you're one of the newfriends that have very recently discovered cryptocurrencies and mining due to the price increase of Ethereum, the worst thing to do at this point is mine Ethereum. Its difficulty was already way too high, profitability has always been average for the typical miner with a medium to high-end GPU.

My advice is to use ProHashing, a multipool that mines numerous low difficulty altcoins, as well as provides a feature to solo mine via the platform, all while being paid in whatever cryptocurrency you wish to be paid in, including Bitcoin.

The following image is my earnings with just an extremely dated 2GB EVGA GTX 660 SC GPU (keep in mind that I frequently mine on other pools for coins that are not available on ProHashing):
ProHashing earnings.png

Notice the higher profits recently? That's down to me noticing that the pool's algorithm often ignores sudden profitability spikes. If you're someone that spends a lot of your time on the desktop, you can easily analyse the most profitable coins at the time on the ProHashing platform, ignoring the multipool's profit selecting algorithm and adding the coin to your mining config. Here's an example:

Profitability.png

ThomasJeffersonCoin seems like a total joke of a coin, right? But so few others are mining it. The difficulty is low. There's money to be made by being one of the few to notice the profitability and jump onto it to be one of the very block finders, which is incredibly beneficial to you if you have a high-end card. Typically, a profitability spike is higher than 500c profitability. Coins with very few miners can suddenly appear for a few hours to a few minutes, but some have block rewards worth 50 cents or so. Hence my sudden earnings of $10+.

The pool was recently under attack and had some downtime, so nobody was able to mine. Profitability of such coins are still low, but will increase a little over time. It can be a bit of a gamble, but if you have the power and are quick enough, there's a lot more money to be made on ProHashing than mining a high difficulty coin like Ethereum, Monero, etc.

Old card still chugging along.png

Despite me having an advantage here, as I'm sure a lot of miners aren't checking the site's most profitable coins like me and are using the multipool's profit selecting algorithm, hopefully this'll help spread some hashrate around.

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Good shit bro. I'm gearing up to FINALLY start mining after I researched it since forever. I'm thankful to you for sharing this strategy with me. You're right that few people go outside of the presets in general.

I hope people understand the risk here. Be careful finding a GPU right now. Ethereum has caused a major price hike in the cards.

I hear it is tough finding "normal" prices. Are you mining @namiks?

I've been mining since the days where mining with laptops was profitable on Bitcoin.

The GTX 1060 seems to be everyone's favourite card right now, and it's currently $100 or so above its actual price. It should be around $250-300.

Damn @namiks what are you up to these days aside from Steemin? You still mining? Thanks for the tip on the type of card to look for and what a fair price would be. Now to try and find some.

Temporarily on backorder - Adorama

Would this card - EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti SC 4GB Gaming Graphics Card, GDDR5, 1354MHz Base Clock Speed, DX12 OSD Support (PXOC), ACX 2.0 Single Fan, PCI-Express 3.0 16x, DVI-D/DisplayPort/HDMI be any good?

Mining, trading, writing about movies and videogames.

At one point I was writing for Cex.io/Ghash.io when they were doing their thing. Was pretty young and not as educated back then. Still only 22 now so a plethora of stuff to learn about trading and cryptos in general.

Well, like I keep saying, if I were younger, I'd probably be richer. Did you catch the wave well enough or was your youth restrictive in how much you could get in front of the wave?

I also just noticed you mentioned the 1050 card. It isn't worth it at all, it's both not very powerful AND somewhat being affected by the price hike in desperation.

Well, Cex.io used to pay me in Bitcoin, typically .10 cents per word, so back then I was easily making $80 or 0.2 BTC per article, and writing 3-5 articles a week. That was around the bear whale trend in which we hovered around $150-250 for a few weeks.

I've made money, I've lost money, both from exchange hacks (Finex, Mintpal, Cryptsy, and Gox) and newbie errors, but I love this stuff too much to ever be discouraged. Luckily, my last two years trading and mining have been very successful as I've learned more about markets and such. I don't really lose any money these days as I look more towards long-term investments rather than margin gambling on OKCoin and the rest.

Thanks - are there any good mining rigs/units worth purchasing to mine altcoins which are withing the few hundred dollars/pounds range that come ready to mine?

There's a rumour that Nvidia is developing a GPU strictly for mining. With the prices of cards being so high and that rumour going around, I'd honestly wait for a possible announcement.

I wouldn't buy a premade mining rig, most will be overpriced and trying to take advantage of newer miners that don't quite understand how things go. Take a look at some altcoins you'd want to mine, find some cards you'd be interested in getting, then see what their hashrates are on them.

That said, all cards will be ready to mine. You just download the relevant mining software on the PC and edit your pool login details, then off you are.

Thanks for this, just what I needed! I'll look into it more and wait for that announcement, cheers

No problem. Feel free to ask me if you have any other questions about mining.

Cheers! Will do

I didn't know about ProHashing, thanks for sharing. Followed.

I believe it is owned by two brothers; one works on the pool full-time. Pretty good service overall. Great being able to mine low difficulty coins and being paid in more expensive, harder to mine coins.

Namiks, could you give advice, which card to buy for AltCoin-mining? Thanks. Great article.

I said this to someone else earlier: There's a rumour that Nvidia is developing a GPU strictly for mining. With the prices of cards being so high and that rumour going around, I'd honestly wait for a possible announcement instead of purchasing anything.

Thanks for the info. I do some research.

It's a bad time to be thinking about GPU mining, but yeah, doing some research will help you make a decision for when the prices go back to normal.

Seems, I'm starting with a gaming card and use it for experimenting. Then I can do the calculation, how profitable the mining of minor Alt coins is. ProHashing looks great. I follow you now. Hope to read more about mining. Here are many guys like me, that would like to learn more about it.

I think I will start to write about crypto a bit more to keep my content fresh and mixing it up a little. If you want, I could write up a little mining tutorial on particular altcoins.

Interesting article. I am dual-mining ETH and DCR right now, but I just wanted to try Prohashing.
Where do I find the list with the profitability values on Prohashing and what do I look for there? High profitability or block reward?

Thanks.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

If you scroll to the bottom of https://prohashing.com/, you'll see it. Typically you just want to find high profitability.

Takes so much time to synchronize. Its not "compatible" with low hashrate miners.