minerstat mining tutorial #12: Profit switch with Block Masters

minerstat
minerstat
Published in
6 min readAug 31, 2018

This is the fourth post with guidance for our profit switch function. In the last couple of weeks, we didn’t only add new multialgo pools but also extend some of the functions and there are more on the way.

One of the things that are different in profit switch, is the fact that you can now choose which mining client you want to use in the profit switch. So if Phoenix miner works better for you than Claymore on Ethash, you can now select it for Ethash and all Ethash coins (or multialgo pools) will be mined with selected mining client.

Now, it is time to present you how to enable profit switch on Block Masters.

About Block Masters

Block Masters is a multialgo, multicoin, autoexchange pool that doesn’t require registration and offers more than 20 algorithms. Although the payouts can be issued in different cryptocurrencies, our profit switch implementation will select the payout in BTC - which is also guaranteed way to get paid by the pool in case the payouts in other cryptocurrencies are delayed. All BTC payouts are automatic and issued every 5 hours for balances above 0.005 BTC and every Sunday for balances above 0.0005 BTC.

The fee for mining on Block Masters is 0.25%.

About minerstat’s profit switch

We have introduced profit switch in one of our previous tutorials. It is a function that is managed remotely from your minerstat dashboard. So to use it, you will need to register a new account at minerstat and set up minerstat software on any of your mining devices. We offer mining OS if you prefer Linux, Windows node if you prefer Windows and ASIC node for ASIC owners.

If you need help in setting everything up, you can check our tutorial on how to start with minerstat.

Address editor

When you have all software ready and working, your first step is the address editor.

Address editor is your pools and wallets address book. So along with other pools already defined, you need to define Block Masters addresses for algorithms you want to mine.

We suggest you use tags that will help you easily distinguish between Block Masters addresses and other addresses. For example, BM-LYRA2Z for Lyra2Z Block Masters address.

In our case, we will set up a profit switch for Nvidia GTX 1080. The algorithms that we are interested in are Lyra2REv2, Lyra2z, X16R, and NeoScrypt.

The pool addresses need to be defined as stratum+tcp://blockmasters.co:PORT where PORT can be found on the main Block Masters page. So for our case, we will use:

  • Lyra2REv2: stratum+tcp://blockmasters.co:4533
  • Lyra2Z: stratum+tcp://blockmasters.co:4553
  • X16R: stratum+tcp://blockmasters.co:3636
  • NeoScrypt: stratum+tcp://blockmasters.co:4233

You can add other algorithms in the same way. When you are deciding which algorithms to include in the profit switch, we suggest you check our coins list. Besides coins and algorithms, you will also find a list of supported hardware and software for this coin/algorithm. Additionally, you can open the mining calculator and select AMD/Nvidia/ASIC to see which algorithms are available for your worker(s).

After the pools are set, we also need to define BTC wallet if we haven’t added it yet.

Profit switch

After we have defined all pools and wallets in the address editor, our next destination is profit switch.

Target

First, select the workers to which you want to apply the profit switch. You can select one or more workers or one or more groups.

Coins

Select the coins/algorithms you want to include to the profit switch. Make sure to select correct corresponding pool, BTC wallet and to type in the correct pool fee (0.25% for Block Masters).

A new version of profit switch also has an option to select mining client and add custom configuration for it. If you want to use default settings, you can leave the option at Autoselect.

Hashrate and consumption settings

For a profit switch to work, we need to define the speeds the worker reach on certain algorithms. If you haven’t tried mining all algorithms yet, you can browse the internet to find some default values and then update them after you first switch to this algorithm and you will be able to see the exact speed.

Our GTX1080 mining on msOS reaches the following speeds:

  • Lyra2REv2: 46.5 MH/s
  • Lyra2z: 2.37 MH/s
  • X16R: 9.4 MH/s
  • NeoScrypt: 0.718 MH/s

Optionally add power consumption and change the mining client.

Dual mining

We won’t be dual mining in this case so we can skip this section and leave values at 0. If not, the procedure is the same as with typing speeds and power consumption for other algorithms.

Electricity costs

Enter the amount you pay for kW/h. In our case, this is 0.11 EUR for kW/h.

When to switch?

Set the minimum allowed difference in coin profitability to trigger switch. This means that new coin will be selected only when it is X% more profitable than the coin you are currently mining. You can set up any value larger than 0%, we also allow decimal numbers.

In this case, we will set 0.5%. If the current coin is making 1 USD/day and the new coin suitable for the switch is making 1.005 USD, we will switch to the new coin. If we would set 5%, the new coin should be making at least 1.05 USD to switch to it.

A new version of profit switch also has an option to select minimum mining time in hours and minutes. The default setting is set at 10 minutes.

Save changes.

Activate profit switch

After you have saved changes, you have only saved the configuration that will be used for profit switch. To really start profit switching, you will need to activate it for your miner.

  1. Open your workers’ config page.
  2. Select the same target as you did in profit switch.
  3. Scroll down to Profit switch.
  4. Click on the gray square to make Profit switch option checked and included in the update.
  5. Select Enabled from the drop-down.
  6. Scroll at the bottom and click on Save changes.

This will activate the profit switch and within 10 minutes your first profit switch selection should be active.

If you have a smaller number of workers you can activate profit switch directly from workers page. Click on Switch miner and toggle Profit switch option to enable it.

You can check your balance on Block Masters on their wallet page or add it to your pools balance monitoring on the minerstat dashboard.

Happy mining!

More from this series:

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