Quote from: BitcoinJacob on December 12, 2016, 12:09:42 AM

I am new to crypotocurrency mining and I recently had an experience that I would like to ask about.

I short-term leased 100MH/s Scrypt hashing capacity and pointed it at a certain pool. I noticed the pool total was about 1.5GH/s at that time.

I watched it for 6-8 hours and I was making about a 30% profit over my costs. In that time I spent about 0.002BTC and had a balance on the pool of about 0.0025. So, convinced, I increased my hashrate to about 1GH/s and left it alone for several hours. After the increase I spent another 0.008BTC but my total earnings (for both timeframes) was only abut 0.0055BTC.

So after my increase I was a large portion of the pool's hashpower (about 40%). Does a pool reach a point of saturation where additional hashpower has no benefit?

I know that there can be diminishing returns on coin networks, but it would seem to me that I can't possibly have been a large portion of the worldwide Scrypt capacity, even though I was a large portion of the pool

Thanks,
Jacob

You have any number of things going against you in that scenario, the first issue that could have occurred is the "difficulty" if you were making 30% @100MH/s I would say you were right on the money, but when you jumped from the 100MH/s to 1.5GH/s (which is a pretty big jump if the net hash was not massive and i guess it wasnt to have given you the 30%) the difficulty would have gone up also and i suspect ot went up so fast you hit quite a high difficulty number that then took a long time to reach and the difficulty lower ------ That is probably what happened.

An example is I quite often mine Lea as it returns a profit quite often, but you need to take a few things onto consideration ie diff, nethash, poolhash and of coarse price, now if i mine Lea with about 1TH/s I make on average around 25% on my expenses, yet if I mine it with around 5TH/s I break even and anything above I lose and its all down to me jacking up the difficulty too fast then taking ages to get the share and dropping it again.

If you are going to go from 100MH/S to 1.5GH/s do it very slowly and not just hit the coin with such a large increase because the coin will all ways set the difficulty above what the 1.5GH/s is supposed to be because it will presume the miner hash is still increasing. most coins are on a 10min or so retarget so it will take that amount of time for the coin to realise that 1.5GH/s is as far as you are going.

So in short slowly slowly is the way to go, and get it out of your head that more hash = more BTC because it dosnt, blocks are found at time intervals and devs set this n the code for example:

unsigned int nTargetSpacing = 10 * 60; // Some Shit Coin

That coin is set to give out a block every 10 minutes regardless of what hash rate is on there.

Hope that helps a little