Quote from: thunderstrk on December 13, 2013, 08:50:16 PM

Can anyone who has a better understanding on how profitability is calculated explain to beginners like me ? I assume it's not as simple as value of the coin relative to BTC and difficulty of the coin. I'm having trouble understanding how it works..I check the last rounds and it seems pretty obvious that certain coins never yield more than 0.0000xx (4 zeroes) whereas others yield 0.000xxx (3 zeroes) for the same amount of time. (and for my 950 kh). I also understand there's a luck factor involved..however I dont see why we would switch from a coin producing say 0.000xxx in 1 hour to 0.0000xx in the same period of time..can't we keep on rolling on that one ? What changed so that the algorithm decided that the 2nd coin is better?

thanks in advance..im just trying to understand how it works

The other major factor is that difficulty is constantly changing across all coins. Litecoin adjusts every 2016 blocks which means roughly every 3.5 days at a fixed hash rate. 720 blocks is popular with some coins which can lead to a 6 hour expected adjustment rate for a 30 second coin. Plenty of other coins have adjustment rates in the double digits, which can go pretty fast if their target block times are low. On top of this you have the simple fact that pools like this and profit switchers in general pile on a coin if its profitability spikes (because difficulty dropped usually). This can cause the average time per block to decrease to less than half of what the target time is until the next difficulty adjustment occurs and slows down the rate by increasing difficulty (lowering profitability). This causes all the fair weather miners (like us) to abandon that coin in search of the next most profitable opportunity.