POOL PROFITABILITY - Big differences?

Archaea

[H]F Junkie
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When I started mining in 2017, I did some different pool testing (tries a half dozen different ETH and multi-algo pools) and at that time there wasn’t huge differences in mining profits per pool. At least I didn’t find them.

I was surprised then today when I came across this site and see what appears to be big return discrepancies. Looks like Hive’s pool is way more profitable than mining pool hub (which was my favorite pool from my last round of mining)
https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-rtx-3080

Is this very large discrepancy valid? Seems like that’s not healthy for distributed pools and independence in mining. I'll keep an eye on this and see if it's just switching due to recently found block rewards and the order changes greatly over a day or two, but if not, then why would anyone continue to mine to miningpoolhub? I highlighted 3 very well known pools...

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I'm using F2pool, and I'm too lazy to switch. Been getting pay outs with my small farm every 4-5 days.
 
Idk why people don't point there hardware at a actual eth pool as its the only thing worth mining currently. I used to use ethermine and it worked well.

I also used mph back in the day and its payouts were pretty close to the actual ether pool and even beat it sometimes when other coins increased in profitability. I did a test a few years ago and mph beat nicehash by ~5% (a few years ago)
 
So... in theory, there should not be a difference between the pools unless they're under a critical level of hashrate. The bigger the pool is (in hash rate), the more consistent its payout will be over time. The smaller pools will have a less consistent payout. Depending on luck, some pools CAN do better than other pools, but over time, that usually buffs out. In the short run, such variations are possible.

You're also looking at data that's potentially apples to oranges - Hiveon seems to be a pure ETH pool, NiceHash is in theory what others will pay for your hash and MPH appears to be for their multi-coin switching pool based on profitability. I would read the results as if MPH is also dabbling in a few speculative altcoins here and there with its pool switching that is lower its overall return compared to pure ETH at the moment. Though, looking at my MPH returns over the past couple of days, they are lower than they have been to the extent that difficulty increases shouldn't explain it - that tells me MPH has had a bad run of luck.
 
When I started mining in 2017, I did some different pool testing (tries a half dozen different ETH and multi-algo pools) and at that time there wasn’t huge differences in mining profits per pool. At least I didn’t find them.

I was surprised then today when I came across this site and see what appears to be big return discrepancies. Looks like Hive’s pool is way more profitable than mining pool hub (which was my favorite pool from my last round of mining)
https://minerstat.com/hardware/nvidia-rtx-3080

Is this very large discrepancy valid? Seems like that’s not healthy for distributed pools and independence in mining. I'll keep an eye on this and see if it's just switching due to recently found block rewards and the order changes greatly over a day or two, but if not, then why would anyone continue to mine to miningpoolhub? I highlighted 3 very well known pools...

View attachment 329320
I made .03 ETH yesterday at MPH, it is more than what What To Mine indicates I should be getting with the GPUs mining. You cannot do snapshots of pools but would have to do long durations since chance/luck is involved in any mining operation. Also since the value changes almost constantly with coins, you cannot even use $ value as a reliable indicator since that can fluctuate over 25% in a single day at times, 10% is very common. Unless the pool is somehow withholding rewards and keeping them they should all over time ( as in 2 weeks or more) be about the same minus fees and donations.
 
I made .03 ETH yesterday at MPH, it is more than what What To Mine indicates I should be getting with the GPUs mining. You cannot do snapshots of pools but would have to do long durations since chance/luck is involved in any mining operation. Also since the value changes almost constantly with coins, you cannot even use $ value as a reliable indicator since that can fluctuate over 25% in a single day at times, 10% is very common. Unless the pool is somehow withholding rewards and keeping them they should all over time ( as in 2 weeks or more) be about the same minus fees and donations.
I’m going to keep tracking this site. I’d have expected fluctuations and chance to have leveled out over time. IE MPH is at the top of the list one time the bottom the next. So far the players have pretty much stayed in layered tiers? Have you tried any of the other pools to see if you make more? Certainly more collective hashing power can lend itself to more successful/more likely block reward payouts. If MPHs hashing power is not competitive anymore they are less likely to get the block rewards. Yes?
 
I’m going to keep tracking this site. I’d have expected fluctuations and chance to have leveled out over time. IE MPH is at the top of the list one time the bottom the next. So far the players have pretty much stayed in layered tiers? Have you tried any of the other pools to see if you make more? Certainly more collective hashing power can lend itself to more successful/more likely block reward payouts. If MPHs hashing power is not competitive anymore they are less likely to get the block rewards. Yes?

Remember your tracking site is tracking the coin switching pool and not the straight Eth pool.

Mph hash power would need to be under a percent or three of the total network to have uneven luck to the point you could be at a disadvantage mining there...
 
Remember your tracking site is tracking the coin switching pool and not the straight Eth pool.

Mph hash power would need to be under a percent or three of the total network to have uneven luck to the point you could be at a disadvantage mining there...
Can you rephrase this? I. don’t understand what you are saying, but want to.

it would appear to me since my latest screenshot update is saying MPH is mining Kapow (on row 13) that minerstat is measuring overall profitability. Not just ETH profitability and MPH’s overall profitability seems low (Which is how I read your previous post and the other posters previous post.) That because they are multi algorithm pools we aren’t seeing apples to apples on ETH profits. But if they are accounting for the other algorithms and the profits are still low (what are we looking at here). I’m confused. Are you saying if you just mine ETH exclusively it would all be about the same profitability at any pool - regardless of pool size and combined hash rate? (Ignoring any pool fee differences). I thought that if a mining pool got too small it would no longer be competitive, and would turn smaller profits, not hitting as many block rewards.

I have not tracked MPH combined ETH hash rate over time.
 
Can you rephrase this? I. don’t understand what you are saying, but want to.

it would appear to me since my latest screenshot update is saying MPH is mining Kapow (on row 13) that minerstat is measuring overall profitability. Not just ETH profitability and MPH’s overall profitability seems low (Which is how I read your previous post and the other posters previous post.) That because they are multi algorithm pools we aren’t seeing apples to apples on ETH profits. But if they are accounting for the other algorithms and the profits are still low (what are we looking at here). I’m confused. Are you saying if you just mine ETH exclusively it would all be about the same profitability at any pool - regardless of pool size and combined hash rate? (Ignoring any pool fee differences). I thought that if a mining pool got too small it would no longer be competitive, and would turn smaller profits, not hitting as many block rewards.

I have not tracked MPH combined ETH hash rate over time.
My apologies - beer for lunch puts me on the jump to conclusions mat, so I may have stepped in it with my logic and not researching enough first.. There's a few things going on here and I'll try to address in more detail -

0. I have not been able to find a data feed from MPH that gives the profitability of its multi-algo pool(s). I can see data on the individual pools and their respective luck.

0.5. Today's chart actually has the MPH Eth pool completely off the charts and its KAWPOW pool on there instead.

1. Comparing a multi-algo pool to a straight ether mining pool isn't necessarily a fair apples to apples comparison, though, now that I re-read the OP, it doesn't look like that was your initial goal - moreso to maximize the profitability of mining, period, which means multi-algo is fair to compare against straight up pools. Issues with the comparison in multi-algo land include things like the achieved exchange rate of the alt-coins for whatever you are receiving payment in (where that trade can end up happening 12+ hours after you mine it where there can be variances in relative value) as well as how good the switching algo happens to be - can it really "beat the market" by constantly switching? Thus, the MPH mutli-algo could be tuned to be more aggressive in "trying" other coins on a speculative basis even if ETH rules the roost as far as profitability actually goes.

2. MPH is actually a much smaller player than I had assumed. They appear to be cranking about 10TH/s on ethash on average with the total network running at 400TH/s right now. In theory, they should find 2.5% of all blocks, or about 144 out of the 5760 (assuming 15s/block) that are produced. That's a fairly low percentage and it means that their overall results will likely vary a lot more than a pool that has say, 10% or more of the total network hash rate. If a pool gets much smaller than this, then the effect of its "luck" plays a better part - you could end up on a multi-week dry spell or a multi-week winning spree. The higher percentage of network hashrate evens those out a lot faster.

3. In theory, all pools have a total network hash pro-rata chance of finding each block. However, there can be things on the pool operations side that will make it more difficult. For example, if the pool submits the solved block to the network slower than another pool that solved it or does not efficiently distribute work shares to its miners, then it can end up underperforming its average for that reason.

Looking in MPH's pure eth stats right now, you'll see there's a TON of variation of luck compared to "expected" (blue) and that the average lately has been below expectations.

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All in all, what does this mean? Who knows :). I guess I'm saying that as long as you're at a sufficiently sized ETH pool and the assumption that they're equally competent, then there should be no difference in ETH earnings over time between those pools.
 
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