Hiya, I was wonder at what total hash rate other miners use to decide to solo vs pool mining. Opinions are welcomed. Thanks Klaian
Currently I pool mine. I want to expand my farm but the ROI just isnt there for me. I think next time i invest ill put more into the PoS and maybe add two more video cards. I just wish dcr price would go up a bit to make mining more profitable.
The problem at the moment is actually not the DCR price. It is high enough if the DCR network would be at 3-4TH/s, i.e. if only people interested in DCR would mine it, as it was initially. Because these people would sell only part of the mined coins and hold most of them or use them for PoS. However appr. three weeks ago Claymore published his dual ETH+DCR miner. Since both coins use algos which are somewhat complementary on hardware usage, this miner is mining ETH at full speed and additionally mines a lot of DCR at the same time. Since ETH difficulty goes up and coin price goes down, ETH miners of which most have no interest in DCR whatsoever use this dual miner now to mine DCR at the same time at no additional cost and therfore get compensated for the decreasing ETH profitability. As most of them will just sell the mined DCR right away, the DCR supply is now higher than the demand. There were always less than 50k DCR for sale on Bittrex. Last time I checked there were 60k. That obviously doesn't help the price. DCR network is now mostly at 7-8TH/s. Half of this hashrate arrived recently and probably consists entirely of ETH folks dual-mining DCR at no cost. When you take a look at the DCR pools, you will now often see very long and cryptic names for miners starting with 0x... As far as I know these are ETH addresses. Mining ETH is still much more profitable than mining DCR and now even more so since DCR profitability dropped after many ETH folks co-mine it at no cost and then dump it, pushing the price even lower. I would therefore suggest DCR miners to use the Claymore dual miner as well and mine ETH at full speed. Profits will be higher than mining only DCR. And at the same time it mines DCR as well at no additional cost. The big slaughter for DCR PoW mining will come later this year or next year, if ETH will really switch to PoS and abandon PoW (they think it will work...). If my back of the envelope estimate is right the ETH network has now the equivalent of 80,000 $500 GPUs hashing. If all those get jobless and turn their attention to DCR, we will see DCR network go to 200TH/s. Of course only if DCR price will return at least some profit at that huge to be expected difficulty.
Yeah it's kind of hard to calculate an accurate ROI since we're still in the early days. Here's some napkin math for someone starting from scratch today using data from dcrstats.com: LAST PRICE: $1.46 HASHRATE: 7.000 Thash/s AVG BLOCK TIME: 04:55 PoS Ticket 30-days average price 21.4 DCR 86400 seconds in a day / 295 seconds per block = 292 blocks per day 7000 GH/s / 292 blocks per day = 23.9726GH/s for a block per day So you need about ~$5400 in GPUs to get 1 block per day @ $26.28 (18*1.46) * 30 days = $788.40 Buy stake tickets with your PoW subsidy for another ~$66.31/month (18*30/21.4*1.8*$1.46) Add more for compounding PoS interest if you plan on rolling over PoS subsidy into more tickets Some other considerations: The hash rate was 4Th/s at the beginning of the month so you'll likely see diminishing returns if the hash rate keeps going up A stable PoS ticket price hasn't been established and is still going up Subtract electricity costs, power supply/other mining rig parts costs
At what point (hash rate) do you decide it is best to stay with a pool or solo mine. I know that target moves as difficulty moves which I am fine. I am not mining for profit right now. I am mining to support the coin. I feel like I don't have the total hast to solo effectively. On the pool side, they seem kind of unstable from time to time. I also know that long term that it should equal out,
For my taste pool become too unstable and I switched to solo mining with 2x R9 Nano two weeks ago. They produce in avarage 3.500 Mh, pool mining was showing about 30% higher hash (I don't know why). Till today I solved 4 blocks and according to my calculations it's about same ammount if I would do pool mining.
That was yesterday. Today there was another huge inflow of hashpower and we are now at over 10TH/s in the DCR network. The next increase in difficulty will probably be the largest so far, something like +200k.