How to Find the Right Mining Pool
Finding the right mining pool takes time. Lots of time. And you need to be very clear about what your objective is. If you have one rig or 100, the right mining strategy can make or break you. Do you want to maximize profits by the hour? Or do you want to stick with a project you feel is going to pump in the future? Do you want a mix of those strategies?
Single Coin Mining
Mining a project you really believe will pay off in is easier than anything else. You find whatever project you are excited about and load up the mining software that supports it. You might be using ccminer, claymroe or something else that works well but you certainly want to test your hashrates on each platform first. Download all the supported miners and manually benchmark them to find out what gives you the best hashrates. I'll do another write-up about how to overclock your cards for best power to hashrate ratios in the future.
I recommend you check out www.whattomine.com and throw in how many cards you're mining with. You'll find that setting on the right hand side under the hashrates. Then you're going to want to enter your power costs and sort by profitability. You may want to change the difficulty for revenue depending on your mining strategy (more on that below) and then hit calculate.
Below the banner you'll find the profitability averaged over the last 24 hours based on difficulty, estimated rewards and exchange rate. It's important to keep in mind that this is just a ballpark. You're taking an average of 24 hours so its not always bang on.
Then from there its easy. You have your mining software, system configured and you just have to find a pool and enter the address you want your rewards to go to. If you need help on how to set up your wallets, most of the pools have comprehensive start guides to get you going. They'll have the supported mining software, suggested configurations and anything else you need to get started. I have found a few pools where their help pages are dated and need some reasearch. You can check the www.bitcointalk.com thread for that coin to get more information based on the latest requirements.
Dual Coin Mining
Now might be a good time to decide if you want to dual mine. Claymore's Dual ETH miner is a great way to do this is you feel its worth it. You're going to lose some hashrate on your primary coin, but you may feel this is worth the effort and extra wattage to do. I feel its worthwhile to add the extra buck and a half per day per mining rig to do so, but you'll want to verify that based on your kWh cost. We benefit greatly from some of the cheapest power in North America, so its really advantageous to dual mine here.
Most of the pools you're going to find like Ethermine do not document dual mining on their site. What we did in the beginning was configure Claymore to mine ETH and then read through the readme file on how to set it up for this. Below you'll find a sample bat file for launching ETH/LBRY dual mining. I recommend that you decide what you want to dual mine based on profitability so you're getting the best bang for your buck. Right now we're dual mining SIA, but you can pick whatever is best suited to your needs.
Profit Switching Pools
Time to switch to the fast lane boys. If you want to maximize profitability you can look into profit switching pools. There's a bunch out there, but the ones I suggest you look at are Mining Pool Hub and Nicehash. Both Mining Pool Hub and NiceHash are simple to set up and easy to get going, but the benefit of using Mining Pool Hub is that they allow you to keep the specific coins you're mining and transfer them out to exchange. You can also auto-convert these based on the current price, but from time to time that is foolish.
Right now all altcoins are down significantly, so selling our coins when they're mined is not the smartest way to maximize our revenue. Our strategy is to hold those coins until the market comes back up, or when we see a coin being run up either through a pump or just because its getting good press. You can chose to do whatever you want here, but for us it makes more sense to wait and sell when things are more attractive.
If you want quick and dirty and only care about bitcoin, Nicehash might be up your alley. I will say this though, we have noticed a marked drop in revenue using this software. I can't deny the ease of setup though, so if you're brand new to mining you might want to give this a go for a couple weeks while you get up to speed on things. I haven't seen a situation yet where it hasn't worked right out of the box.
Supercharge Profit Switching
To explain it simply, Mining Pool Hub runs a batch script that attempts to connect to pools in a round robin fashion. On the pool side, they either deny or allow access based on what they see as most profitable. It works great for the most part, but its slow as you roam through the connections waiting to get in on the pool that is unlocked for your account. It's probably not the end of the world for a 4 rig mining setup but as you expand things, you'll want to get every bit of those coins you possibly can.
Our solution to that was to move to Awesome Miner. I have to give a shout out to Patrik Engström at InteliBreze, he's put up with a lot of shit from us in the form of stupid questions, feature requests that come out of the blue. He's weathered the storm and been very quick to respond and provide solutions to things that come up.
Why Awesome Miner was selected by us was for a few reasons.
- It has a mobile website that we can control rigs from anywhere
- It allows us to group miners and point them at different accounts
- It switches FAST. Right now. No roaming pools.
- It uses the API's from whatever source you select to drive hashpower, thus maximizing profitability.
- We can run multiple pool configs for miners, allowing us to manually dial our hashpower to a coin if we want to dedicate to it.
It's got a few problems though, but nothing that should stop you from downloading the free 2 miner version and having a look. The web console could use a face lift and maybe some graphs. They're missing the dual coin breakout for profitability. But aside from that, its functional AND reliable. That matters in this game.
The help guide was written by people who actually use this software so expect to run into things that you have trouble configuring in the first few days. Make sure you reach out to Patrik and he'll answer all of your questions, no matter how painful they are and how many you send. It's important to note that they are not in a North American time zone, so you'll get replies very early in the morning and they'll go dark on you in the afternoon while they get much needed sleep.
We're currently still fine tuning the software to make the most out of coin difficulty drops and price spikes. It doesn't seem to react very well when there's a pump and dump going on, so keep in mind that you'll have a few hiccups along the road. We recently changed our profit switching time frame to 15 minutes and that seems to be helping. I'll provide a much more comprehensive guide to Awesome Miner once we've got the beast dialed in to save people the learning curve we've gone through.
Another great feature of this software is crash detection, remote restart and overheat protection. You can fine tune these settings however you like to suit how you want things to run. One of the great things about this software is we can set our overheat protection and the rigs will be shut down in the event things get too hot for our liking. We try to keep our rigs around 60c whenever possible and it's nice to have another added layer of protection in the case that MSI Afterburner fails to do its job. And it has. And it was rescued by Awesome Miner. Very impressed.
So that should get you pointed in the right direction. How you mine and what you mine with are completely up to you. I've just shared a couple of ideas and one of the ways we like to run things. There's no right answers in this game and your solution might just be better than ours. If so, drop us a line!
If you have any questions feel free to reply and we'll get back to you. If you think this post might help a friend, please forward it.
We were not paid to endorse any products and or services in this article. These opinions are strictly our own and should be researched completely before being acted upon.
Good luck out there!