Analysis of the Recent Performance of Hashco.ws (and Multi-Coin Pools in General)

Coin selection of late for most of the multi-coin pools seems a bit whacky. I don't know what the algorithm for Hashco.ws is, but I can look at Coinwarz and coinchoose and get a good idea of what sort of profitability each coin is supposed to have. I'm starting to wonder if Hashco.ws and others aren't being intentionally mislead by some external site on what to mine -- do they do their own internal calculations, or do they use externally available calculations? The reason this is important is because if it's not internal and correct, the results can be less than desirable. Let me give some examples from today's Hashco.ws statistics.

I just saw Mincoin showing a potential 600%+ profit relative to LTC on Coinwarz (around 10PM PST), which is pretty amazing. Not surprisingly, Hashcows was mining MNC at that time. But just a few minutes later, MNC was at 77% profits vs. LTC, so in the course of 10 minutes or less, MNC spiked to a huge value and then plummeted to a lousy value. The result of this is that Hashcows spent 10 minutes on MNC, mining 36 MNC that at current exchange rates are worth 0.02382912 BTC. If they were to mine at that rate 24/7, all 1700MHash of power at Hashcows would generate 3.43139328 BTC in a day, or around 0.002 BTC per MHash, which is obviously far less than what you would get from just mining LTC (currently around 0.007 BTC/MHash).

Now if this was the exception rather than the rule, that would be fine, but for the past few days that doesn't appear to be the case. Hashco.ws mined WDC for 126 minutes earlier today, generating 1283.0131392 WDC during that time. If we mined 24/7 on WDC, that would work out to 14663 WDC per day. At the current exchange rate (0.00043139) they could trade for at best 6.325 BTC. That means around 0.0037 BTC per MHash. But Coinwarz is showing 125% profitability vs. LTC right now. Maybe we just had an unlucky spell?

Let's try another.... Round 6565 at Hashco.ws was Ron Paul Coin (RPC), for 3 hours  55 minutes (3.917 hours), during which time the pool mined 59.0672 RPC. At the current exchange rate of 0.0191 BTC per RPC (and the best we've seen in the past 24 hours is only 0.02655 BTC per RPC), we're looking at 361.9437 RPC per day, which would be worth 6.91 BTC (or best-case 9.61 BTC), so again we're well below the 100% mark of LTC mining. Remember, LTC mining on its own with 1700MHash out to generate 436 LTC per day, which at 0.029 BTC each is 12.35 BTC per day.

But all of the alt-coins are going soft, right? Well, not quite....

What about DOGE? I know it was created as a joke coin, but I haven't seen a round of DOGE lately on Hashco.ws, which is odd. With 0.00000045 BTC per DOGE, based on the Coinwarz calculator Hashco.ws should be able to get around 18.171 BTC per day with 1700MHash, so there's at least one alt-coin that's beating the odds. Hell, even at the worst trade value of 0.00000025 BTC per DOGE (from Jan 8-9 time), we'd be looking at 10.095 BTC per day, which is still better than any of the other alt-coins I've run the calculations on above.

This is a long-winded way of saying something has perhaps gone fubar with the Hashco.ws (and Middlecoin and probably others as well) algorithm for selection of coins. Maybe it's that difficulty plummets, making the coin(s) look attractive, but by the time 1700MHash enters the picture the difficulty jumps back up and profitability drops back to nothing. Whatever is happening, all I can say is that right now profitability for mining via the multi-coin pools is not working out to what it should be. And what it should be is more profitable than mining LTC directly -- that's the whole point.

If you're still trying to mine at Hashco.ws or Middlecoin, I know personally the returns have been very poor for the past week -- like less than half of what you should get relative to mining LTC. Just going static on mining one of the more stable alt-coins like DOGE, WDC, LOT, EAC, etc. is supposed to be beating LTC by at least 20% over the past 14 days, and every time the multi-coin pools switch it seems to result in lower profits for miners. For now, I'm going to try manually mining one or two of the "best" alt-coins for a day and see what sort of returns I can get via Cryptsy's automatic trading. I'll report back and see how I do compared to Hashco.ws (where I've left ~1MHash of mining power).

Mining Litecoin and Alternative Cryptocurrencies - Estimated ROI

My last post on the ROI for mining Litecoin with the new R9 290/290X GPUs is still more or less on target -- difficulty is stabilizing for now, with an expected return of around 2 LTC per week per R9 GPU. That works out to around $45 per week, or $180 per month, so you'll have paid for your R9 290/290X in three months, give or take. But what about switching to some alternative cryptocurrency?

In roughly one week of mining, I mined about 1 BTC with 7000 KHash of GPUs. That works out to over $700 per week for hardware that you could match with seven or eight R9 290X GPUs, eight or nine R9 290 GPUs, or ten R9 280X GPUs. Now if you do the math, at present that means best case you would need $4600 worth of R9 290X cards, $4000 or R9 290 cards, or just $3500 worth of R9 280X (HD 7970) cards. Until prices are closer to MSRP, it looks like the 280X is the one to get.

Now, if current alternative cryptocurrency mining remains even close to where it's been, we're looking at roughly $2800 per month, so you'd pay off the GPUs in less than two months, and realistically all of the hardware could be paid for within two months. That's pretty darn appealing if you ask me! And you don't have to go out and buy dozens of cards in one fell swoop either -- just start with a single rig and if you go with 3-way R9 280X you could have the whole system for around $1500, and it would be paid for in about six weeks.

The problem is Hashco.ws is still in a state of disarray following the hack, so I've moved to Middlecoin for now. I switched about 5000 KHash of PCs to Middlecoin six hours ago, and at present it looks like my BTC balance is 0.0135 BTC. For a full day of mining that works out to 0.054 BTC, which would yield roughly $40 per day, $1200 per month -- not quite so rosy. I'll update tomorrow when I've seen just how many BTC I get through Middlecoin after a full day of mining, as it could still be ramping up my payouts; I'm hoping to get about twice that (0.1 BTC per day), which is closer to my previous rate with Hashco.ws.

Update: I've switched most of my systems back to Hashco.ws as the primary pool, with Middlecoin as the secondary pool. Hashco.ws is still a bit of a pain, as you can't log in to create new workers, and if you don't have an account already you're out of luck until they get the front end to their site working again. However, I'm getting payouts of around 0.075 BTC per day from Hashco.ws, and Middlecoin is typically providing another 0.015 BTC per day. So around 7000KHash/sec is generating 0.09 BTC daily, or close to $70 per day in income. Power costs are around $400 per month for my systems, but modern R9 builds should be more like $200-$250. Net income per month thus works out to $1500-$2250.

Hashcows Christmas Eve Hack -- What Now?

I've been around the BTC world for a while now, and people running off with your coins is far from unusual. I lost about 50 BTC in the implosion of Bitcoinica, and I witnessed all the PirateAt40 shenanigans, for example, and there have been more than a few collapsed exchanges and pools. When things go wrong, everyone starts by talking a good game -- "We'll figure out what went wrong and then reimburse people as we're able!" A few days turns into a few weeks, then a month, and then suddenly silence. Then maybe a final message saying, "We're almost done and will reimburse next week..." and that's it.

So what's going to happen with Hashco.ws? At first I thought they might just fix a minor security flaw and then move on, maybe with some 0% fees for those that had BTC stolen, or maybe paying out refunds as they were able. After all, we're "only" talking about a 40BTC heist, give or take. However, 40BTC is still worth roughly $30,000 so for two guys running a pool that could represent a lot of money. And if they can't actually fix the security vulnerability properly, calling it quits might be best.

At present, the Hashco.ws site is in "read-only mode" for BTC withdrawals, and if you weren't actively logged in at the time the site went into lock down, you can't see your balances, workers, etc. I'm lucky in that I have a PC that was logged in, so I can see what's going on. I have nearly 0.40 BTC in earnings I haven't not yet collected, and I'm certainly worried that I may never be able to collect. Not surprisingly, my choice has been to move my mining operations elsewhere on most of my systems -- Middlecoin is my poison of choice for now, so we'll see how that goes.

I wish those involved with Hashco.ws the best of luck, and I really hope they can rectify the problems and get the site back up and running, but even though my current estimated payout per day is looking quite good (something like 0.02 BTC per MHash), I'm not going to risk mining there until they're running properly, with working logins and payouts. I'd suggest at the very least diversifying your mining portfolio in the short term.

Merry Christmas -- definitely a lousy way to wake up, which is why I'm glad I don't run a mining pool!


Update: Hashco.ws has posted the following as of this evening. It looks like they're trying to do the right thing and cover the losses for most of the miners. How long will it be before the site is back to normal and regains all trust? That's yet to be determined....

As has been mentioned in an earlier update, on December 24th 2013 someone was able to modify the Bitcoin payout addresses of many users of Hashcows, and trigger a manual cashout of current balances. 754 total users (out of a total of 8,142 registered users, 5,000+ of which have a BTC balance > 0) had BTC removed from their accounts, accounting for approximately 14.2% of users who held BTC on Hashcows. A total of 40.7815 BTC was removed and sent to address 13R87ropkDKzDEuVeQoX64kkcLvPWVdTKH. Hashcows staff have followed up with all major exchanges and a number of other large pools to confirm if they had any trace of this address in their systems, which as of this time has not turned up any useful results.

Since the attack was noticed on the 24th, we've placed the site in a locked down read-only mode, and disabled all payouts. While we understand this has caused some frustration among users, not being able to see if their accounts were affected, we felt it was the responsible course of action to take, given we knew we were unable to dedicate the time required to diagnose and address the security issues on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

We've been working since this time, both in determining the cause of the attack, and its potential scope, including an external audit of the source code by a trusted 3rd party. At this time the belief is still sql injection, based on the nature of the attack and how it was carried out. However, regardless of the technical results of ongoing audits, 2 things are confirmed. #1 The web instance and the mining/stratum instances are physically seperate. The mining instance remains unnafected by the web based lockdown, which is why mining continues to function as usual. #2 The web front-end is undergoing a rebuild from scratch as we speak, by both myself and another developer, utilizing different technologies, improved security features, and new hardware. We hope to have a basic version of this up in the coming days.

What does this mean in the immediate future? We'd prefer to not turn on write access for the website in its current form, but obviously understand people can't be expected to wait much longer for balances held up by the system (both old balances still intact, and earnings mined over the days since lockdown). We'll be posting a simple tool for people to use, allowing you to login with your credentials, at which point it will send out an email verification link, including your current balance and payment address the site has for you. Once clicked, your balance will be sent to the address specified. If you need to make changes to these details, instructions will be provided on the tool page. We hope to have this posted by tomorrow.

Last but not least, perhaps the question many have been waiting for an answer on. What does Hashcows plan to do about the missing 40 BTC? We've thought long and hard on this, and its obviously one of the most important decisions we'll have made in our short existence as a pool and community. Its a situation and decision that has hung over us throughout the last couple days spent with family.

Hascows will be re-imbursing every miner 100% of losses incurred on earnings made within the last 7 days prior to the incident (Dec 17th's payout inclusive). This means any funds you earned between Dec 17th and Dec 24th that were cashed out of your account by the attacker, will be re-added to your account at Hashcows expense. This payout will recover 100% of losses for 463 of the 754 affected users. For the remaining 291 users, we'll be offering reduced fees of 0.5% for at least the next 60 days to help with any shortfall.

In closing, both aTriz and I want to make a statement on more of a personal level, we have been absolutely stunned by the community that you have all created with this pool. There has been a tremendous amount of support and encouragement through these not so fortunate times and we would personally like to say Thank You. We look forward to the future of this pool while we begin the rebuilding stage which will continue to bring this wonderful community more features, more safety, more support, and more cows!

nearmiss.

Radeon R9 290/290X Litecoin Mining: New Settings and Revised Expectations

Over the past several weeks I've had a flood of comments and emails about R9 290/290X hashing performance when mining Litecoins (or any other scrypt-based cryptocurrency). Initial experience with the cards suggests that the Radeon R9 290 can hit up to 900KHash and the Radeon R9 290X can hit 1000KHash, but the key part of that is "up to". In practice, the cards vary, sometimes wildly.

There are a lot of 290X cards that seem to top out in the 800-850KHash range, and short of adding better cooling I'm not sure how much farther you can push them. R9 290 tends to be more like 750-800KHash on a lot of cards. I think if we could get voltage adjustments working, we might be able to improve on those results for a lot of cards, but we probably won't have that for a few more weeks if not months.

One of the keys to understanding what's required for tuning performance on the new Hawaii R9 290/290X cards is that AMD has built in safety protocols to keep the cards running "safely". A lot of people have tried my original settings and come up with far lower performance than expected. This is why I provided batch files to help you tune and tweak performance.

Scrypt hashing by design is far more memory intensive than SHA256 hashing. The idea was to make it impossible or at least impractical to do scrypt hashing on GPUs, let along FPGAs and ASICs. So far, no one has yet released any FPGA or ASIC hardware for scrypt devices, and I suspect we're probably still at least a year away from such hardware becoming publicly available. (There may be early hardware undergoing "testing" for month in China or elsewhere first, of course.) So when you're looking to fine-tune your GPUs, start with the memory clocks and push those as far as you can while maintaining stability -- and maybe add a few extra cooling fans to help out! If you want to hit extremely high hash rates, you'll want the memory clock at 1600MHz or higher, and most cards won't do that without some sort of additional cooling or other modification.

Once you've found the maximum reliable memory clocks for your GPUs, only then should you start tuning the GPU clock speed. What's interesting is that even though most cards will happily accept GPU engine clocks of 1000MHz or higher, in reality they'll often run at far lower clocks -- this is AMD's safety protocols kicking in. So if you start off at 950MHz core and 1350MHz RAM and a thread concurrency of 32000 (give or take), and you find your hash rates are closer to 600 or 700KHash rather than 800-900KHash, don't despair!

Start with a lower GPU clock of around 800MHz (on R9 290/290X) and then start bumping it up 25MHz after about 10 minutes or more testing at each clock speed. You'll most likely find that 850MHz ends up being the sweet spot, and then you can play with clocks a bit more bumping it up/down in 5MHz increments to see if you can squeeze a bit better performance out of your system. When all of that is done, only then should you bother with tweaking your thread concurrency.

And with that said, here are my revised settings for R9 290/290X graphics cards. I'm going to include cgminer settings for four cards as an example this time, just to illustrate what you would use. I've also included three pools, the first two being multi-coin pools, since that's what I use these days. I'm also going to try toying around with BFGminer to see if I can coax anything better out of it. For the time being, these settings are more or less "stable".

cgminer.conf settings for ~810 KHash R9 290X / ~770 KHash R9 290

{
"pools" : [
{
"url" : "http://stratum01.hashco.ws:8888",
"user" : "trogdorjw73.tester",
"pass" : "tester"
},
{
"url" : "stratum+tcp://middlecoin.com:3333",
"user" : "13saHMFfUAv1crYp3QLbFr9aP1JYnb89oh",
"pass" : "x"
},
{
"url" : "http://coinotron.com:3334",
"user" : "trogdorjw73.tester",
"pass" : "tester"
}
]
,
"intensity" : "20,20,20,20",
"worksize" : "256",
"kernel" : "scrypt",
"lookup-gap" : "2",
"thread-concurrency" : "24272,24272,24272,24272",
"gpu-engine" : "850-850,850-850,850-850,850-850",
"gpu-fan" : "45-85,45-85,45-85,45-85",
"gpu-memclock" : "1475,1475,1475,1475",
"gpu-memdiff" : "0,0,0,0",
"gpu-powertune" : "50,50,50,50",
"gpu-vddc" : "1.100,1.100,1.100,1.100",
"temp-cutoff" : "100,100,100,100",
"temp-overheat" : "95,95,95,95",
"temp-target" : "85,85,85,85",
"api-mcast-port" : "4028",
"api-port" : "4028",
"auto-fan" : true,
"expiry" : "120",
"failover-only" : true,
"gpu-dyninterval" : "7",
"gpu-platform" : "1",
"gpu-threads" : "1",
"hotplug" : "5",
"log" : "5",
"no-pool-disable" : true,
"queue" : "1",
"scan-time" : "60",
"scrypt" : true,
"temp-hysteresis" : "3",
"shares" : "0",
"kernel-path" : "/usr/local/bin"
}

And just in case this isn't clear, with the above settings you would launch cgminer.exe with the following command:

cgminer.exe --auto-fan --config cgminer.conf --failover-only

Litecoin vs. Hash Cows: Profitability Compared

There's plenty of interest in mining Litecoin right now, as it's generally considered the most profitable of the alt-coins (Bitcoin being the primary cryptocurrency). In fact, LTC is now at the point where it's basically no longer an alt-coin -- mission accomplished. But there are a ton of other alt-coins that are still being mined, some potentially more profitable than others. Here's a somewhat complete list of the market capitalization of various cryptocurrencies if you're interested -- basically Bitcoin is now at just under $11 billion, and Litecoin is about 7% of that at $764 million. Third place is Peercoin (PPC), at 13% of the value of LTC: $97 million. Quarkcoin (QRK) is fourth, and represents the top coin that can still be mined with CPUs, but it's basically mined out now (despite the recent brouhaha where it increased in value 500% over a few days -- good for those that mined early, but with seven systems I only created about 6 QRK per day, or $1.50 -- maybe just barely enough to pay for electricity for the systems in question).

Anyway, getting on to the point of this post, all of the cryptocoin miners know by now that difficulty and pricing for every coin fluctuates quite a bit. Lately, BTC and LTC are just increasing in difficulty quite rapidly, but that's because for those that have the latest hardware (second-generation ASICs for BTC and 7900 or R9 290 series GPUs for LTC) are making great returns. What if you want to skip the two most popular coins and instead mine something not as well known? What if you created a pool that would look at all of the major Scrypt-based coins (excluding LTC) and choose the one that is currently the most profitable to mine? What if the pool automatically converted all of your alt-coins into BTC every day? That pool is Hash Cows. (Other similar pools exist, but Hash Cows is what I'm testing right now.) From their FAQ:

What Does your Pool Do? The pool automatically mines the most profitable coin from our list of available coins and the miner has the option in their settings page to either be paid out in that coin, or directly in Bitcoin. This decision can be made on a coin by coin basis, with some being paid out as the original coin and some being paid out in Bitcoin, and in any combination.

Sounds great, doesn't it? So here's the deal: I have about 6500KHash/sec that is currently going into LTC mining, which nets me a bit more than 2 LTC per day. At current LTC prices, that's $70 or so per day, with an electricity cost of $10, so a net profit of $60. It's not enough for me to quit my day job by any stretch, and certainly it's not something I would feel confident in depending on right now, but it's a nice bonus -- plus the PCs help heat my house in the winter. (Summer isn't so nice, though!)

By way of comparison, Hash Cows has a profitability chart showing the returns you can expect from their service. Based on that chart, doing 6500KHash (6.5MHash) would get me anywhere from 0.039 BTC (11-16-2013) to as much as 0.24 BTC (12-09-2013) in a day. Even at $900 the first value isn't very interesting: $35 in a day is less than half of what I would get from mining LTC. The second option on the other hand looks really nice, as it would mean a whopping $216 per day -- about three times as much as I make by mining LTC! It was enough for me to point all of my rigs at stratum01.hashco.ws:8888 for the past day and a bit. (Note that I kept LTC mining as a secondary fail-over pool for mining as well.) And the result? Well, that's where we run into problems.

The first day I only had my PCs mining at Hash Cows for maybe a third of the day. Then I noticed that all of my rigs had switched back to LTC mining, and apparently Hash Cows' stratum proxy was having problems. Anyway, my payout for the first day was pretty uninspiring: 0.00913815 BTC ($8.22 at the current price). I hoped that by devoting a full 24 hours to mining I would get a better result, and I did: 0.04457882 BTC ($40.12). That's still about half of what I would have earned mining LTC.

Here's the real problem. Remember that "Profitability Chart" that I linked. Above is the screenshot showing yesterday (12-12-2013). In theory, based on that chart I should have made 0.019 BTC per MHash. If my PCs were doing 100% of their work at Hash Cows, that would yield 0.1235 BTC ($111.15). In practice, I received about one third that amount.

There are some other issues as well, like the bit about automatically mining the most profitable Scrypt-based alt-coin. That's basically false, or their algorithm is really bad, or their statistics chart is totally inaccurate (and has bad math). If I look at the returns from their pool right now, just in the past few hours I see 1:14:10 spent mining WDC generating 0.004423 BTC (that would work out to 0.08588 BTC per day), and then I see another where 43:58 was spent on MEM  generating 0.001778 BTC (that would work out to 0.05823 BTC per day).

You might be inclined to call this a scam of some form, but I'm going to give it a shot for another day and see how it goes. I've also noted my exact LTC balance at my mining pool so I can see how many LTC I mine when (not if!) Hash Cows is a bit too slow at responding and my rigs fail over to Hash Cows. We'll see how it goes tomorrow, but right now it's not looking very good for Hash Cows. There is a lovely disclaimer at the bottom of the profits chart, though:

* Please note, the data above is a somewhat small sample size taken from miners known to have mined 24/7 and auto-exchanged 100% of coins. Your results may vary slightly based on reject rate or receiving non-btc for some coins etc.

Like I said, I mined 24 hours on Hash Cows yesterday and their chart just doesn't match my result. I think part of the problem is inefficiency though -- every time they switch coins, my miners all seem to swap over to my secondary pool for several minutes, and they tend to switch coins every 20-30 minutes on average. That could mean I earned $40 from Hash Cows and another unknown amount from LTC mining (perhaps as much as 1 LTC), which would then be more or less a tie. But if you're looking at the chart above and expecting to make three times as much as you would get mining LTC, you're likely going to be sorely disappointed.

There is an upside however: while it looks like LTC is currently outperforming Hash Cows, if the difficulty of mining LTC continues to go up 5-10% every few days that may not be the case in another month or two. Given the choice between mining 0.5 LTC per day or the 0.045 BTC I got from Hash Cows yesterday, they would come out ahead. That's of course assuming their mining profitability doesn't go to crap in the meantime.

To be continued....