How does one know if the number we see is correct and not because of it being manipulated or something wonky going on? I ask because what I am minin on my 1070 ti is at $3.33; so, it's at a price that could be plausible, but one could never know. Which is why I am starting to really like the idea of allowing is move to the second most profitable coin. Maybe like have a button that lets us do that when prices are mistakenly high for whatever the reason could be. Thank you.
You are correct that there a lot of factors that could exaggerate pool prices. That is one reason I included the Price Spike Limit to prevent the software from wasting time mining coins with unrealistically high prices. As you noted, the price in your example is plausible. However, the only way to confirm that the pool's estimate is reasonably accurate is to look at your actual earnings on that pool. Unfortunately, there are a lot of accusations out there concerning various pools and their prices estimates. Sometimes issues with orphan coins or volatile coin values can look like manipulation and sometimes manipulation does occur. For example, people always complain about temporary orders on NiceHash that are quickly replaced by low orders once a large number of miners have switched over to an algorithm based on the artificially high price. That is why I include a variety of pools so that users can try to find ones that they like and trust. I also encourage everyone to research what others are saying about each pool in the Pools forum on this site.
The ability to choose a coin that isn't the most profitable is an interesting idea and I am considering ways to implement it in a reliable, user-friendly way. My concern is that there may be unintended consequences for the user's profitability. For example, what happens if the second most profitable coin has a value 25% less than the most profitable? Some users would then want to take a chance on the most profitable coin instead and others may not in that situation. Accommodating both types of user would require additional parameters to limit when the feature is used. While a button that allows users to manually switch to the next profitable coin may avoid a lot of the configuration issues, it would require users to sit and watch their rigs all the time.
I'm currently considering ways to give users more control over the coins that are evaluated for profitability. However, due to the various factors and complexities involved, it is most likely going to be a combination of features instead of one single feature that does everything. In addition to the Price Spike Limit, currently users can disable pools that you don't like and you can also set price adjustments on the pools that you want to adjust their estimates to better reflect your actual earnings.