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.

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