i don't dwell on it 24/7 but I've seen us mining a lot of LTC and Doge while there were more profitable coins to mine. If we weren't so big, we could have mined and more profitable coins. We didn't,a t least not much, selling a lot of those would sink their exchange rate and raise their difficulty.

if you take in the account the limited market for smaller and more profitable altcoins, then yes, the bigger we are, the lesser the profits will be, since lesser coins have small market depth so we can't mine (a lot) of them, so we must  go for the bigger, less profitable ones, hence the bigger we are, the lesser is our profitability.

Well the business, or endeavor, is what you make it. You can do it wild west style, or you can do it the proper way. I would spend up to 30% of the cash on hiring people for PR and stability improvements, but that's just me. Take a look at how the hashcows handled their big issue, that's how you handle problems. Now if only I didn't have a well paid job and a family, and had a little bit more hair.... oh wait, that's not needed

Anyway - times were good for a while, people could put up with issues while the profits were high, but now the focus should move to stability, support and PR. A lot of people invested their hard earned cash into rigs, and that should, must, be treated with respect.

Bitstamp seems to do it within couple of days, gox from what I've read takes very long. I'm not sure the problem is with banks, they should like to have new big customers, if you are a millions per month company, banks should be happy to get you - if one bank is too slow for your - you can change it. I'm not sure where the actual problem is.

This pool might have become too big to be significantly more profitable than LTC, even as profitable is not easily attainable. Victim of it's own simplicity and success.

Profits have been steadily declining, particularly visible in the last few days, and IMHO not nearly as profitable as top 5 coins. I've almost got tears in my eyes seeing the missed profit, and the lack of time to do anything about it. Yes, we're big so it's simply not possible to mine the most profitable coins, due to insufficient market depth for them, so we must settle for bigger, less profitable ones. That defeats the very purpose of the profitability pool. If the target was a "stable, no hassle pool with medium profitability", we could probably be reaching it, if there wasn't for all the beta testing, which, when you want to keep your customers, is usually not rolled out without sufficient testing. I do SW development coordination for living. I would lose my job if I did beta testing with real customers, on production systems. My job is to prevent that.

Op's lack of transparency is understandable, the pool hashrate is still growing, so good PR, or even any,  PR is obviously not needed to run the business as enough hash will come in anyway. I would certainly not run it that way, but it seems that there's a lot of followers who see nothing wrong with it, so it can't be expected to improve. With this income, there is room for investing a part of it in building a loyal customer base, to build a lifelong business, not a one time off deal. Even though the money is good, it will not last for a lifetime.

I live in Croatia and Sweden. Gox prices are tempting but I put a lot of effort in this and can't risk payment delays or worse. Gox support was incredibly, incredibly slow when I had a trivial issue, I can't allow that with my money.

I actually do have a couple of coins I consider legit and with good perspective, but unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm better off by mining more profitable coins and trading them for the ones I really want, than to mine what I support directly. By not doing profitability mining I am being "robbed" by others who do, and there's to many of them.

what are your experiences with it lately? I'm considering whether to do it via gox, or transfer to bitstamp and do bank transfer from bitstamp, that would cost me 10% because I'd have to buy BTC at mtgox at higher price, transfer BTC to bitstamp, and sell there at lower price.

 

well I'm mining altcoins, trading some for BTC, keeping some as lottery tickets. There are too many of them though, difficult to tell which ones will prevail or even survive the upcoming years.

Better late then never. Mined bitcoins for a few weeks long time ago, what a mistake was to abandon it because of the fan noise

Trying to catch up now, hoping not to get a divorce because of my new hobby.


BR to all fellow miners.