Quote from: Terk on May 17, 2014, 01:32:25 AM

Quote from: lixxy on May 17, 2014, 12:34:49 AM

How come profitabiliy is low right now, isn't Nautiluscoin super profitable to mine right now? Shouldn't Clever be jumping on that before the train leaves?

Of course we're mining NAUT. We've been mining it for the last four days and I believe we've been the first coin-switch pool which added it (i.e. Waffle added it only yesterday). But the case with coins adjusting difficulty every block is that they swing from being very profitable to very unprofitable. We mine them when they're profitable, but most of the time they are not profitable because lower difficulty blocks are mined faster than higher difficulty blocks. Not only because of difficulty, but because all coin-switching pools move away from a coin when it becomes unprofitable and network hashpower drops significantly. The result is that block with 300% profitability is mined within 30 seconds, but block with 50% profitability can wait even 30 minutes to be mined. And our hashpower during these 30 minutes goes somewhere else. The result is that there is only very small percentage of time when such coins are really profitable. And of course we use all this time to mine them, but when their profitability goes below other coins, we switch to other coins.

Yesterday NAUT was the most profitable coin during only 14.2% of the day and we put 14.2% of our yesterday's hashpower into it. The result was good and we earned 177% LTC profitability on NAUT. But we had bad luck with LTC mining yesterday and found less blocks than statistically expected, so our profitability from mining LTC was at 70% (this is normal and is because of variance). Breaking down our yesterday's results by LTC vs. all other coins, 47% of time/hashpower spent at mining LTC got us 70% LTC profitability, while 53% of time/hashpower mining other coins got us 119% LTC profitability. All this combined got us 96% profitability. If we had 100% profitability when mining LTC, then combined with other coins our yesterday's result would be at (0.47*100% + 0.53*119%) = 110%.

LTC has so high difficulty that mining it has high variance and you can't do anything about it. Straight LTC pools get anywhere between 50% and 150% LTC profitability in any given day as well. The difference is that even if we have 70% profitability when mining LTC (what any straight LTC pool can also have), our other half of hashing-time has 119% profitability, what results in 96% day instead of 70% day.

Thanks, that was extremely informative! Keep up the good work.