A lot of miners aren’t aware that you can also mine at NiceHash with other mining software instead of NiceHash Miner or Excavator. Well, you can. Even more, minerstat allows you to use profit switch between all of the NiceHash’s pools. As they are offering software for mining at their pools, you might wonder how and when could you benefit from using some other software to mine at NiceHash. In this tutorial, you will learn all that and more.
About NiceHash
NiceHash is a crypto-mining marketplace where you can sell or buy hashing power. The company is located in Slovenia, Europe, and is operating since 2014. If you act as a seller of the hashing power, you are mining on the pool the buyer of the hashing power selected and for the price that was set by the buyer on NiceHash marketplace. Because of that, NiceHash acts like a PPS multi-algo pool for miners, which is convenient as you will get paid in one cryptocurrency (currently, this is Bitcoin) and you will get paid the exact amount of reward for the valid shares you have provided. The fee for mining on NiceHash varies from 2% to 5%.
- 2% is for those mining to NiceHash wallet.
- 3% for those that are mining to external BTC wallet and have the balance greater than or equal to 0.1 BTC.
- 5% for those that are mining to external BTC wallet and have the balance smaller than 0.1 BTC.
Payouts are issued as followed.
- Once per day for NiceHash wallet with the balance greater than 0.001 BTC.
- Once per day for an external BTC wallet with a balance greater than 0.1 BTC.
- Once per week for external BTC wallet with the balance greater than 0.001 BTC.
About minerstat’s profit switch
We have introduced a 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 mining software if you prefer Windows, and ASIC Hub for all ASIC owners.
If you are wondering when and why would you benefit from using minerstat software and dashboard to mine on NiceHash pools, we have a few examples and reasons.
- It is easy to set up a profit switch between NiceHash pools and other pools for direct coin mining so you can only mine on NiceHash when it actually benefits you (taking fees into consideration).
- You want to have total remote control over your mining rigs.
- You want to control the alerts you get and where you want to receive them (e-mail, Telegram, smartphone) and you want to take immediate action in crisis situations (e.g., high temperature, unresponsive rig, etc.) with the help of smart triggers.
- You want to use custom mining clients.
- You don’t want to gradually move to the algorithm that is more profitable but to jump to the new algorithm as soon as the profits meet the criteria you have set in the profit switch settings.
If you need help with setting minerstat up, you can check our tutorial on how to start with minerstat or join us on Discord.
Address editor
When you have all the software ready and working, your first step is the address editor.
Address editor is your pool and wallet address book. So along with other pools already defined, you need to define NiceHash addresses for the algorithms you want to mine. We suggest you use tags that will help you easily distinguish between NiceHash addresses and other addresses. For example, NH-ETH for Ethash (DaggerHashimoto) NiceHash address.
In our case, we will set up a profit switch for mining with Nvidia GTX 1080. The algorithms that we are interested in are Ethash, Equihash, Lyra2REv2, Lyra2z, X16R, and NeoScrypt.
The pool addresses need to be defined as stratum+tcp://ALGORITHM.LOCATION.nicehash.com:PORT where ALGORITHM is the algorithm name as defined at NiceHash, LOCATION is eu or usa, and PORT the port for mining that algorithm. For our case, we will use:
stratum+tcp://daggerhashimoto.eu.nicehash.com:3353for Ethash.stratum+tcp://equihash.eu.nicehash.com:3357for Equihash.stratum+tcp://lyra2rev2.eu.nicehash.com:3347for Lyra2REv2.stratum+tcp://lyra2z.eu.nicehash.com:3365for Lyra2z.stratum+tcp://x16r.eu.nicehash.com:3366for X16R.stratum+tcp://neoscrypt.eu.nicehash.com:3341for NeoScrypt.
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 hardware list where you can browse for your mining device to see which algorithms are available for your worker(s). For example, this is the list of coins and algorithms for GTX 1080. You can find all algorithms that are available at NiceHash on this link.
After the pools are set, we also need to define the BTC wallet if we haven’t added it yet. It is up to you to decide if you will mine to your own BTC address or to NiceHash wallet. Take into consideration the fees, the payout schedule, and the size of your mining operation.
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 in the profit switch. Make sure to select the correct corresponding pool, BTC wallet, and to type in the correct pool fee (2% for NiceHash wallet and 3% or 5% for regular BTC wallet).
If you prefer to use a mining client of your choice and/or with custom settings, select the miner and edit its configuration. Otherwise, you can leave it at Autoselect. If you will select a custom configuration, make sure to include the right pool and wallet tags as with custom configuration it won’t be automatically replaced with your selection.
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. You can even find the hashrates on the profitability calculator page at NiceHash. However, the speeds might vary depending on your hardware and mining client that will be used (for example, using our Linux mining OS and mining Ethash will include the Ethlargement pill so your speeds might be much higher than on the profitability calculator).
Our GTX 1080 reaches the following speeds on mining OS:
- Ethash: 35 MH/s
- Equihash: 480 H/s
- 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?
With the minerstat profit switch, you can customize the conditions when to switch. With pool fees and electricity consumption, you take these costs into account, and in the “when to switch” section you can set even more parameters.
First, you can set the minimum allowed difference in coin profitability to trigger the switch. This means that a new coin will be selected only when it is X% more profitable than the coin you are currently mining.
Second, you have an option to select minimum mining time in hours and minutes. The default and minimum settings are 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 the profit switch. To really start profit switching, you will need to activate it for your miner.
- Open your workers’ config page.
- Select the same target as you did in the profit switch.
- Scroll down to Profit switch.
- Click on the grey square to make the Profit switch option checked and included in the update.
- Select Enabled from the drop-down.
- 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 the profit switch directly from the workers page. Click on Switch miner and toggle the Profit switch option to enable it.
Happy mining!
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