minerstat mining tutorial #38: ASIC profit switch with Luxor

minerstat
minerstat
Published in
6 min readNov 26, 2019

One of our latest pool partners is Luxor - a pool that supports multiple different coins and offers a special service called Catalyst, which allows you auto-conversion of the mined coins to Bitcoin. Since the majority of coins are for mining with ASICs, we will today show you how to set up an ASIC profit switch and how to enable auto-conversion to Bitcoin.

We will show you how to set up Equihash coins for mining with Antminer Z11 or Innosilicon A9++ ZMaster, for example, but you can use the same procedure for other coins, algorithms, and ASICs.

About Luxor

Luxor is operating since 2018 and currently supports the following coins: BTC, ARRR, KMD, SCP, ZEN, ZEC, XMR, DCR, AION, LBRY, and SIA. Payouts are made every hour to all the miners whose balances are over the minimum payment requirement. The minimum payout thresholds are different for each coin and you can find the whole payment schedule here.

Luxor is using a PPS (pay-per-share) reward method, which alongside their Catalyst feature makes them a really interesting choice for profit switch. The fee for using the Luxor pool differs from coin to coin from 1% (for mining Equihash coins) to 3% (for mining Bitcoin).

About minerstat’s profit switch

Minerstat’s profit switch is a feature that allows you full customization of your profit switching setup. You decide which coins you want to add and on which pool you want to mine. Additionally, you can also set various parameters that will control the switching conditions (like the minimum difference, minimum mining time, reward type, and so on).

Profit switch with Luxor

In this tutorial, we will show how to set up a profit switch on Luxor with Antminer Z11. We will switch between ARRR, KMD, ZEC, and ZEN. All of these coins are using the Equihash mining algorithm.

1.a Address editor

The first step in setting up a profit switch is address editor. Address editor is your personal address book of the pools’ and wallets’ addresses. Each pool and each wallet is saved under a certain tag, which can then be used in the general mining client’s config or in the profit switch.

First, we need to add all Luxor’s addresses to the pools section of the address editor. You can find all of the stratum addresses on the Luxor’s official website, by clicking on the coin’s name. For our example, we will add the following pools:

  • ARRR: arrr-eu.luxor.tech:6611
  • KMD: kmd-eu.luxor.tech:6600
  • ZEC: zec-eu.luxor.tech:6666
  • ZEN: zen-eu.luxor.tech:6677
You can also download the list of all Luxor pools from our pool partners page and import it with one click to your address editor.

Then we need to add wallet addresses to the wallets section of the address editor. Because we will use the Catalyst feature, we won’t use coins’ wallet addresses for identification, but the username we are using on Luxor. If you want to use your ARRR, ZEN, ZEC, and KMD wallets directly, you can, but in this case, you will need to add all four of them.

1.b Set up Catalyst

First, navigate to your Account overview on the Luxor website.

Click on [Settings] button and enter your BTC address. The threshold for payout is set at 0.001 BTC, but you can also increase it to up to 0.5 BTC.

Then click on [Catalyst] tab and click on the toggles for all the coins you want to enable for auto-switching. In our case, this is Zcash (ZEC), Horizen (ZEN), Komodo (KMD), and Pirate (ARRR).

2. Set up profit switch

After you have all addresses prepared, you can continue to the profit switch.

2.a Target

First, select your worker as a target.

2.b Coins

Then add all coins, pools, and wallets to the coins section. For each of them, you can also enter the correct fees, password, and select ASIC as a mining client or leave the mining client at autoselect (this will automatically select ASIC as a mining client).

2.c Hashrate and consumption settings

Fill the hashrate and power consumption for your ASIC for Equihash or load them from our hardware database.

2.d Electricity costs

Enter your electricity costs per kW/h, if you want to include it in the profit calculation.

2.e When to switch?

Select the minimum difference that is needed to switch to a new coin. For example, setting this to 10% means that in order to switch to the new coin, the new coin’s reward must be 1.1 USD if the current coin’s reward is 1 USD.

Also set minimum mining time. For PPS pools this can be optional, but it is always recommended to not switch too frequently as the time between switching isn’t spent on mining. For ASICs, we also recommend setting up a longer period as the syncing is not as frequent as with GPU rigs.

2.f Reward method

Lastly, select the reward method you want to use.

  • The normal reward method will use the default estimated reward.
  • The ignore outliers method will replace any outlier with the average reward from the last hour.
  • The apply penalties method will apply penalties to all rewards in regard to how dispersed the data is.
  • The buffer method buffers the multi-algo pool reward in case the multipool is reporting higher payout than the most profitable coin without the low volume on the algorithm.

Since Luxor is a PPS pool, we will leave the reward method at normal and since it isn’t a multi-algo pool of this kind, the buffer method doesn’t need to be activated as it won’t have any effect over the calculations.

In the end, click [Save changes].

3. Activate profit switch

After you have set up a profit switch for your worker, you need to enable it for the targeted worker as well.

You can do that in the worker’s config …

… or from the workers’ list.

Happy mining!

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