I mostly use hashco.ws as a failover and don't mine much but am I wasting hashes not staying on the site for more than an hour or 2?
Thanks for any guidance.
You're fine mining for shorter periods, but your earnings may end up spread across subsequent days depending on which rounds you catch.
1. The simple but super useful Profit Diagram was removed from here: https//hashcows/profits.html
2. The "Account Ledger" was moved and disabled. As a result all transparency was lost when reviewing or analyzing payouts.
Agree, we could do with Hashcows bringing those things back asap. If you've checked out the latest news
https://www.hashco.ws/news/ the ledger etc is in development. The system was rebuilt entirely after the hack to make it more secure, rendering the old ledger and charts useless. They have been working hard to rebuild and improve, while staying on top of new coin releases. The main dev is also currently squeezing things in around pressing family issues (see the news page).
3. Regardless of the profitability rate (even with recent Doge and Meow boom) a group of friends and I are still making about half the profit in a 24 hour cycle. We switched to dedicated pools as a test and noticed a considerable difference in payout after converting to BTC.
The recent Dogecoin boom is irrelevant as Hashcows barely mined it, unlike before Christmas - this is for reasons discussed elsewhere in the thread. The MEOW boom was great for a few days. Payouts from the first 24-48 hours were spaced across the following days, as the pool mined so many coins that dumping them all at once would've obviously crashed the market.
Trading strategy has to account for situations like that, where a large percentage of freshly mined coins go to Hashcows. In the case of MEOW, this has skewed some miner's perceptions of what they have or haven't got out of it. If you'd stopped mining on Hashcows 48 hours ago you'd have still got a payout yesterday. For a relative comparison to other pools, the first day or so of MEOW on Hashcows worked out at over 0.03BTC/MH/s per day based on ancedotal evidence from the IRC channel.
From a miners perspective rather than purely as a Hashcows fanboy, it makes sense to diversify your mining, if you have multiple rigs and can do so. Hashcows can be a useful part of your strategy due to the way they chase new opportunities, and if you don't mine there at all, you're potentially gonna miss a few epic days - the "off" days are still generating a decent payout in recent times. Splitting your "bread and butter", bill paying hashing power 50/50 with a pool like Middlecoin probably makes good sense, as does saving a little of your firepower for more speculative mining, which can allow you to get out ahead of the big multipools on some coins (while they're worth 0.04BTC/MH/s per day or more).