Please take the volatility of the crypto market into account when considering the 180 day mining time-frame of this blog post. Bitcoin reached almost $20k USD in late December 2017, then dipped to a low of $8k USD and is now trading at just over $11k USD. The alt-coin market had a similar bumpy run. The volatility has a direct impact on the profitability (or lack thereof) of mining.
I mined Monero using xmr-stak with 1 x nvidia GTX1080 GPU. It was slow going. Profitable, but very slow going. I mined 0.4 of a Monero token. According to coinmarketcap.com, 1 Monero token is worth $362USD (as at 6th Mar 2018), which is roughly $466AUD. This values my 0.4 of a mined token at roughly $185AUD ($144USD). I mined for 90 days, which gave me a daily return of $2.05AUD ($1.60USD). My mining pool (supportxmr.com) payed out in Monero (XMR).
A colleague at work mentioned that he had recently switched away from mining Monero (with xmr-stak on the supportxmr.com pool – my exact mining setup), and began using nicehash.com because of its superior returns (paid out in Bitcoin, BTC).
Interesting! After all, us miners are interested in maximising returns. I decided to perform a like-for-like comparison (90 days back to back).
With nicehash downloaded and installed, it benchmarks your system, allowing each mining instance to understand which algorithms it can mine effectively on any given hardware. Once nicehash starts mining, it changes the hashing algorithm based on cloud mining contracts that are available on the platform, while considering the algorithm for your rig, and the overall profitability (otherwise known as ‘switch mining’). For instance, my GPU based mining rig nicehash interface is currently showing me that in the last minute, it has used ‘equihash’, ‘blake2s’ and ‘lyra2rev2’ hashing algorithms. nicehash pays out BTC to either a nicehash or external wallet.
So here are my nicehash results, on exactly the same hardware that I used with xmr-stak/supportxmr:
Old high-performance water cooled gaming PC with 1 x nvidia GTX1080 graphics card and Intel i7-4771 CPU @ 3.50Ghz 4 cores, 8 logical processors.
Between $2.40 – $8.74 AUD per day ($1.86 – $6.79US) – 555H/s on equihash, 5.03 GH/s on blake2s, 50 MH/s on lyra2rev2, 933MH/s on keccak, 1.39MH/s on neoscrypt
My current nicehash Bitcoin wallet balance is $341 AUD ($264USD). Over the last 90 days, the average daily return has been $3.78AUD ($2.93USD).
So my clear and resounding conclusion is that nicehash pays more (in BTC) than xmr-stak into the supportxmr pool does (in XMR).
nicehash pays every couple of days, no matter the size of the outstanding mining balance. supportxmr pays when a minimum threshold of 0.1 XMR is reached.
I would recommend that anyone interested in mining cryptocurrency at least downloads the nicehash miner and allows it to perform the benchmark. Once the benchmark is completed, you’ll get an estimated daily earnings calculation. So far, this is the most profitable miner/mining method that I’ve been able to find for my equipment.
If you have any new ideas, please do share.
Happy mining!