Introducing Luxor Switch
Over the past year, our miners have been focusing on maximizing the efficiency of their mining operations. Investing in good hardware, installing firmware, reducing opex, using innovative cooling methods, and deploying ASIC Management Software, etc. They have become incredibly good at producing hashrate. The missing piece is how to maximize the value of their hashrate once produced.
We are excited to announce the launch of our most ambitious product to date.
Luxor Switch is a profit-switching algorithm that increases the value of our miner’s hashrate by switching between chains. We are happy to offer a product that further increases the profitability of mining operations.
We are starting by offering support for Equihash mining. If you have an Equihash miner you can send your shares directly to us and get paid in Bitcoin.
By having a smart switching algorithm we were able to generate 4.5% of uplift over ZEC and 15.1% over ZEN during our 72 hour testing period.
Over the 72 hours between 2020–05–04 and 2020–05–07 as shown above these were the results:
How to enable Switch?
Enabling Switch is extremely simple, you need:
- A Luxor Account
- Equihash Hashrate (Antminer Z15/Z11/Z9, Inno A9+/A9, Nicehash, etc)
- A Bitcoin Wallet Address
1.) Setting up User Account
If you don’t have a Luxor Account start by signing up here.
2.) Setting up Workers
After you login into our platform, the Dashboard tab will give you an option to add new workers.
A scanning tool like AngryIP or Locator from Minerstats allows you to scan every device on your network and see its IP address. After getting your miner’s IP address, plug it into your browser and you are ready for configuration.
After you have scanned your machine and configured your network settings it is then time to set up Switch.
Unified Global Stratum Endpoint
stratum+tcp://equihash.luxor.tech:700It automatically proxies your miner’s TCP connection to the nearest available region without having to think about regional settings or port numbers. Additionally, if the nearest region is temporarily down for various reasons (bugs, cloud-provider maintenance, etc) then your miner will automatically get redirected to the nearest region to prevent any loss in hashing.
Workername can be anything, but avoid using symbols or special characters as it may be invalid.
Worker: LuxorUsername.WorkerName
Password: 123
For the other nodes (Pool 2 and Pool 3), feel free to use any of our other Equihash pool nodes, such as zec.luxor.tech:700 or zen.luxor.tech:700 .
Once you have these specifications press Save&Apply in your machine. This saves and applies the settings and also reboots the mining process.
3.) Setting up Your Payouts
The final thing you will need to do is to add a Bitcoin address. To do so, navigate to the Settings section (top-right corner), enter a valid address and define your payment threshold. Payment thresholds can be as low as 0.001 Bitcoin to as large as 0.1 Bitcoin.
Monitoring Revenue and Miner Performance on Luxor
Once you’ve started hashing, grab yourself a beer! It’ll take about 5 minutes for your worker to appear on our stats page. Head to the workers page and click on Switch, you will see hashrate stats for all the miners you are running.
How Does it Work Under-the-Hood?
For a more detailed understanding of profit switching we recommend giving this article a read.
Profit switching is chain-agnostic, which means that instead of mining a single coin we utilize different options for your hashrate based on the underlying algorithm. Taking the Equihash alogirthm as an example we choose which coin is the most profitable to mine (i.e. ZEC, ZEN, KMD, ARRR, etc) based on profitability.
We found that during a 24 hour period there are on average 55 different intervals in which one of the four cryptos we switch to becomes the most profitable. So in order to maximize the profitability of an Equihash ASIC, we switch chains on average every 26 minutes.
We implement this switching at the pool level. We automatically assign work to your machine and collect your equihash share. The pool then submits the share to the chosen Equihash coin’s network. This way the miner is paid out for the share they submit, at a higher (or equal to) payout than a normal ZEC/ZEN pool.
It is advantageous to do this switching at the pool level because we can switch the jobs behind the scenes meaning that the connection between your ASIC and the pool is never broken. If you were to keep switching between pools it would lose minutes every time it had to reconnect. Therefore, large operations that switch chains regularly themselves will end up with lower profitability.
Measuring coin “profitability” isn’t as straight forward as looking at the network difficulty, emission rate and coin price. There are other considerations such as liquidity fees to get the altcoin back to Bitcoin, network fees and moving the market. We want to make sure that the switch pool is nimble enough to get the higher reward from the smaller chains but not too large that it ratchets up the difficulty levels.
Because it would be a nightmare to manage 4 different Altcoins, Switch quotes your hashrate directly in BTC. You will see your Satoshi balance increasing every few minutes.
We also don’t want other people to front-run our switches so we do not publicly disclose the exact methodology of the switching algorithm. It is based on proprietary information and technology that allows us to get a strong uplift for our miners. As shown previously during the testing period this has shown a 4.5 % uplift of ZEC and 15.1 % over ZEN.
Already a miner or interested in getting started?
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