1. There has been recently a huge increase in hash power across the board for most coins, this is return makes the profitability of the coin's go down because of course the difficulty goes up.
2. The price of coins that we are farming haven't really gone up enough to combat these lower profits due to the increase in difficulty.
Im not comparing payouts from a few weeks ago to today, I only started mining a week ago to see what al the fuss is about. On hascows Im getting sometimes up to 25% rejects. Mining one coin directly Ive had 24 hours at near zero.
Regarding the payouts, if I mine say WDC for 24 hours on a dedicated WDC pool, then convert to BTC on cryptsy on auto trades (no waiting to cash in on the best rate etc), I can make almost 30% more than mining on hashcows for 24 hours. This should not be possible if the haschows pool did what it is supposed to do.
The difficulty has gone up on all coins, correct, but it had already gone up when I started mining just a week ago. There is a review a couple of pages back by a guy that has mined for a while, and he has come to the same conclusion, that mining on hashcows is making much less than just doing it on one solo coin and switching yourself. If Im going to be donating a percetage to keep the system working, then it should be, well... working.
4. Our pool even with the stated issues above, has been on par with the other multipools, so it's not just our pool that is experiencing low payouts.
We wil see. Ive switched to middlecoin and from calculations so far on just a couple of hours, the payout seems a lot better. will report back once Ive compared like for like 24 hour periods. If I had 2 machines I would set them mining one on each and do a like for like. Perhaps somebody that has two equal machines can do this test and prove the payout is the same across this pool and others?
5. Just because you go to coinchoose/coinwarz and say "oh look I can make X amount in 24 hours mining this, it's so much better than hashcows!" That is not the case, there is too many factors to figure into it, price of the coin, difficulty changes, rejects, liquidity, etc. A perfect example would be a person that was in IRC just yesterday stated he tried to mine GDC for 24 hours, it resulted in him getting 1/3 of the payout stated on these sites.
Correct, mining a single coin will not always result in the payout you expect, but when I spent 24 hours making my own switches (eaving it on WDC as a stable one when I slept) I made it to 0.041BTC in 24 hours. Mining on your pool I make 0.02. SOmething is clearly wrong with that. I hope its server issues and nothing more sinister.
Why quote a profit per MH/s average on your site if the true results are absolutely nowhere near it? The cynic in me would suggest that has been done to attract more people to the pool and therefore gain more commission from the increased has rate. Its a bit unfair if those quotes are misleading though.
As I say, Im on middlecoin for a couple of days and Ill compare against returns from hashcows and see which is best for myself. Others are free to make thir own choice.