When miner wants to set up a profit switch for the first time, he is usually excited to increase the machine potential earnings and wants to include as many coins and options as possible. But this approach can backfire, especially if the hardware has low hashrate. This is why the profit switching process needs to be carefully designed and needs to allow lots of customization. It can take some time to set it up, but once you find the sweet spot, you won’t have to change much anymore.
In this post, we will explain which settings are important to consider when you are setting up a profit switch.
👉 Coins
As already mentioned, it is not recommended to enter too many coins or multi pools to the profit switch. The main reason for this is that if your hardware has low hashrate, it will take ages to reach the payout threshold. Here is an example of mining ETH, ETC, RVN, and BEAM. We will be mining all four coins on a 2miners pool.
The payout thresholds on 2miners are the following:
- ETH: 0.05 ETH
- ETC: 0.1 ETC
- RVN: 50 RVN
- BEAM: 3 BEAM
One Nvidia 1080Ti reaches the following hashrates and estimated earnings for these coins:
- ETH: 45 MH/s = 0.00014983 ETH/hour
- ETC: 45 MH/s = 0.00426982 ETC/hour
- RVN: 35 MH/s = 0.28859763 RVN/hour
- BEAM: 51 H/s = 0.07200360 BEAM/hour
Here are the different estimated times that are needed to reach the payout threshold.
1x 1080Ti
- ETH: 333.7 hours = 13.9 days
- ETC: 23.4 hours = 1 day
- RVN: 173.3 hours = 7.2 days
- BEAM: 41.7 hours = 1.7 day
If each coin is mined ¼ of time, this prolongs all calculations by four times, which means that you can reach the ETH threshold only after 8 weeks of mining, which isn’t very efficient. Other coins will reach the payout threshold sooner, but it will still take at least a few days.
1 rig with 8x 1080Ti
If you are using a rig with 8 such GPUs, then the estimated times are 8 times smaller.
- ETH: 41.7 hours
- ETC: 2.9 hours
- RVN: 21.7 hours
- BEAM: 5.2 hours
If each coin is mined ¼ of time, this means that it will take around 1 week to reach the ETH threshold, while other coins will reach the payout sooner.
300 rigs with 8x 1080Ti
Mining with a farm with 300 rigs where each rig has 8 such GPUs will decrease the estimated times drastically. The payout threshold will be reached within minutes instead of hours or days and this also means that miner will get his rewards several times in a day — even in the case of ETH.
One important thing to point out in this section is also that you shouldn’t add the same coin to the profit switch multiple times. If you do, make sure that the only one of them is enabled. This is because the coin field is what is used for comparison and if you add two ETH coins with different pools, the same ETH rewards will be compared, and only the first added pool will be chosen.
👉 Pools and multi pools
When considering which pool to add to the profit switch, the most important factor is the pool’s reward scheme. We have explained different reward schemes in one of our help articles so we won’t go in too many details at this point. But here is a short overview and where it could go wrong with profit switching.
- PPS (pay-per-share): Pays for each submitted valid share. Suitable for profit switching, but has larger fees and lower rewards.
- PROP (proportional): Pays once the block is found and proportionally to what miner submitted to the pool. Suitable for profit switching and has normal fees, but reward depends on the pool’s luck — if no block is found, no reward.
- PPLNS (pay-per-last-N-shares): Similar to PROP but reward gets only to miners that submitted N last shares. This is to prevent pool hopping, which makes such a reward method not suitable for profit switching unless you can mine on the pool for a longer period and blocks are frequently found. Fees are normal, but reward again depends on the pool’s luck.
👉 Mining clients
There are two ways to set up profit switch: leave mining client at autoselect or select your own mining client.
If you go with first, our system will select the mining client that reached the best hashrates on a particular algorithm in most cases, including the mining client’s fee. Mining clients are ranked based on the benchmarks minerstat users made.
If you want to select a mining client on your own, you can do a benchmark and select the mining client that was the best for your mining rig. Additionally, you can change the config of the mining client you select for the profit switch.
👉 When to switch?
In this section of profit switch, you need to define two different parameters: minimum difference and minimum mining time.
When choosing both, take into account the following.
How long does it usually take for your mining client to restart?
10 seconds? 20 seconds? 30 seconds? The more GPUs you have, the longer is this time and for some coins (such as ETH, where DAG needs to be generated) this might take even more time. This is a lost time when you are profit switching. So if your mining client needs 30 seconds to restart and you set minimum mining time to 10 minutes, this means 5% hashrate lost if profit switch will actually switch every 10 minutes. Similar will happen if you set too low minimum difference.
What is your pool reward scheme?
It is again worth noting that different reward schemes will give different results. If the pool is paying for each valid share you submit, then switching frequently won’t be a problem. This is especially true for NiceHash or Prohashing, which are paying you in one currency for each valid share — so you can switch from one stratum to the next without losing already earned rewards. However, if the pool’s reward scheme is PROP or PPLNS, you will need to find the best values for these two parameters, which will give you optimal rewards. A lot also depends on the pool’s luck, which depends on the hashrate the pool can provide and how often it finds blocks.
ASICs?
Profit switching works fine with ASICs too, but unfortunately, some ASICs have troubles when responding to too frequent configuration changes. Our team has released a new service that improves this: Stratu.ms.
👉 Reward parameters
The last important thing to consider is the reward parameters. We offer different ways to adjust the estimated reward calculation - all with a goal to remove unreliable estimations and save you few switches that are highly unlikely to provide more profitable results. Here are a few quick rules you can follow:
- For NiceHash, you can use the “Normal” reward method as they are reporting estimated rewards based on real-time marketplace status and pay per valid share. You don’t need to turn on buffer, but do make sure to turn on earnings trigger which will reset profit switch on sudden drops.
- For all other multi-pools, you can use the normal reward method, but it is also advised to turn on the buffer method.
- If you are experiencing spikes only every now and then, turn on the “Ignore outliers” method and earnings trigger.
- If you are experiencing spikes very often, these spikes won’t be detected as an outlier and the “Apply penalties” method is more suitable.
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