I have a question and a theory for the GPU miners, or anyone with a better understanding of mining than what I have.
It seems to me that the rewards from mining are not distributed evenly amongst miners, at least not on the x17 algo. I've been mining shield at the BSOD pool (x17) from time to time, and I've noticed that the payout is always lower than what the discord channel says I should get (!hashprofit x17). And not just by a little. For the last 10 hours, I have received about 2.1 XSH per hour (@ 25 MH/s), while the discord channel says I should get about 7.5 . So I'm wondering if anyone else has similar (or different) experiences.
First: the difficulty fluctuates a lot. I suppose that is because the blocks are to be distributed evenly among the different algos. So that when a lot of blocks have been found in a short time at x17, the difficulty spikes, and it takes a long time for the next block to be found at this algo, while block time will decrease in other algos. And when that high difficulty block is found, difficulty drops sharply for a few blocks, so that we get a cluster of blocks at low difficulty mined in a short time. Then difficulty spikes again to make sure average block time is at 235 seconds. This results in a pattern where blocks are found very frequently for a few minutes (at low difficulty), then difficulty rises fast, and then there's a long time without any blocks found, before the pattern repeats. You can see it at
https://blockstats.pw/shield/I've noticed that the BSOD pool often finds the blocks with a high difficulty, while it seldom finds the ones with low difficulty. So I decided to compare average difficulty for BSOD with the average difficulty for the network for the last 24 hours.
https://blockstats.pw/shield/ reports an average difficulty of 340.5.
The average difficulty of found blocks at BSOD for the last 24 hours is 681, with 60 blocks found.
The BSOD pool has a hashrate of a little over 2 GH/s, while the network average hashrate for the last 24 hours has been 6.2 GH/s. So BSOD should have found about 1/3 of the blocks. With a block found every 235 seconds (at average), that amounts to nearly 370 blocks per day. That means BSOD should have found over 120 blocks, and they've only found 60.
It could hypothetically be due to BSOD having really bad luck, but when the difference between actuality and probability is that big, I don't think luck is what's causing it. And it seems to me that this is a consistent pattern, though I haven't compared difficulty or found blocks for other periods.
So, is it possible that someone has made a program that is monitoring the difficulty, and mining the algo only when difficulty is low? They might be switching between different algos, as the same pattern with a few high difficulty blocks and lots of low difficulty blocks clustered together can also be seen for lyra and blake. This would mean that they'd be switching algos several times an hour, and on very short notice, as the low difficulty blocks are found very soon after a high difficulty block. It would lead to a situation where those of us who keep mining on a single algo gets a significantly lower payout than the average which is reported at discord, while those who only mine when the difficulty is low will get a payout well above the average.
So my question is whether this is possible, or is my theory off for some reason?
And for other GPU miners: do you get a profit which is close to what the discord channel says you should get, and if so, on which pool?
