Well, thank you all for the feedback, help, and guidance so far! ...
MinerGate sucks, they steal hashrate. Use any command line miners like Claymore.
Thank me later.
Thanks, will do!
If you're not quite sure of what you are doing just yet and don't mind being paid in Bitcoins, you should use NiceHash. They are somewhat similar to MinerGate, but a lot better and offer way more options for GPU mining. Very easy to use too.
www.nicehash.com --- Try them out for a bit and later if you learn more about how to set things up yourself you can try mining directly to a more traditional pool if you like.
Well, it is not so much that I don't know what I am doing (even though I don't REALLY know what I am doing just yet, lol...), it is just that I haven't quite found the best solution to mine Ethereum with using the setup that I have. This isn't my first time mining in general or anything... I have been mining BitCoin since 2013 and I have gone through quite a few different miners since then. I only wish that I had gotten into mining Ethereum years ago when it was $11-$12 before the price really skyrocketed recently... I would be all set now if I had! lol... However, I was still actively working on my BitCoin mining farm trying to get the most out of that and adding new miners, etc... I think I am finally at the point where I can go no further with my BitCoin mining farm (for now anyways), so that is why I am now turning my attention to Ethereum.
However, unlike BitCoin mining currently, it seems that it is a bit trickier and more time consuming trying to get setup to mine Ethereum. It's not just like go out and buy a miner, plug it in, configure it to point at your mining pool, and let it run to start earning BitCoins. There is a little bit more to it than that in order to mine Ethereum and that is what I am trying to figure out now. I know it may be relatively simple to those of you who have already done it and have been mining Ethereum for years, but when you don't know exactly what to do, it can be confusing to try to figure it out on your own, especially since there is not just one single way to do it and no one way is really the "right way" to do it or anything...
I did look into
NiceHash, but I think I will stay away from that as I am already mining BitCoin currently with six AntMiner S9's and one AntMiner S7 in my basement (approximately 87-88TH/s average on the pool right now...). However, it is an interesting business model, allowing people to rent out their mining equipment (whether they are ASICs, GPUs, or CPUs) to get a steady income of BitCoins. However, I don't really understand why anyone would do that when you can just mine the currencies yourself with the mining hardware you have and keep all the earnings for yourself? (Unless for some reason there are some people out there who either don't want to or can't figure out how to mine themselves who are willing to pay more for the hashrate than you can earn from it if you used it to mine with yourself? But if that is the case, that seems overly opportunistic to take advantage of people like that who don't know any better...)
About the only thing interesting about Nicehash though is that they have their own mining software as well, called
Excavator. I have no idea if it is more optimized than the crappy MinerGate software and will work better or not? I haven't played around with it either to see if you can use their software to mine on a different pool with so you can keep the Ethereum that you have mined. With the Ethereum price having gone up as high as it has (and I'm thinking it will continue to go up more in the future), I really want to mine ETH to try to add to my position as much as possible before the next major price increase. (I already cashed out all the BitCoin I had around the end of April and bought Ethereum with it when the price was around $76-$78. I ended up buying 30 ETH at the time for about 1.73 BTC. (You can do the math on it to figure out how much I made off of that purchase in about a month...
)
I'd recommend staying away from MinerGate's GUI Software, when mining with GPU's its losing about 25-45% of the effective hashrate that you could be getting with QTMiner or Claymore's miner. However I think that if you want to Mine with say CPU's MinerGate's GUI isn't that bad... but stay away from GPU mining if you're going to be using the GUI it's just not optimized at all for it.
I personally use Claymore's ETH miner for mining Ethereum, and I use Alpereum's Pool no fees all fees are paid by Alpereum, and payouts are at 0.2 ETH, so its a win-win compared to MinerGate which has 2% fees... Not that great compared to many other pools that offer 1% and even 0.05% fees. But on top of that, they require you to send your hard earned Ethereum and other coins to MinerGate's wallet on their website (not your own locally or on a exchange) and they require you to pay another fee just to withdraw or transfer your earnings to another wallet!
The way I see it, MinerGate's just profiting off of others that don't do enough research into mining and if I can make a recommendation, stay away from them, you'll profit more at a different pool, just research low fee pools, and low payouts you'll be fine.
~Zac
Thanks a lot for that explanation as well, Zac! That does make a lot of sense and I will definitely be moving away from MinerGate as soon as I can. I haven't researched
Alpereum's Pool yet, but it sounds very promising. Another pool I was contemplating using is
Nanopool. I also saw that the
AntPool has recently started offering Ethereum, LiteCoin, and ZCash mining on their pool as well, but apparently no one is using it for mining much else other than BitCoin right now.
As far as MinerGate goes though, I thought that they only have a 1% PPLNS fee (or a 1.5% PPS fee) on their pool? However, like you said, they do end up sending all of your mining revenue to their own wallet, which you then have to withdraw your funds from to put it into your wallet so that you can use it (or sell it or whatever you plan to do with it...). So, I'm not sure if that is where you came up with the 2% fee for MinerGate that you stated above? Obviously the lower the fees the better. It does seem sneaky though too that MinerGate holds onto all your mining revenue in their wallet instead of sending it to your wallet as you mine like just about every other pool on the planet does. It definitely seems that they are trying to target beginners who are just getting into mining and may not have their own wallet setup yet. (Plus they advertise their site everywhere it seems as it came up very quickly and repeatedly when you start searching for Ethereum Mining Pools...)
I am still debating between
Genoil's ETHMiner and
Claymore's Miner right now to setup on my computer... I'm not really sure if either one is better optimized for nVidia graphics cards than the other or not? Still, it sounds like anything will be a major improvement over MinerGate anyways, so I better just pick one and go for it! I will update once I have set something up and started mining on a different pool to let you know how I made out. (I have just been very busy this week and have been kind of lazy by the time I get home from work and I don't feel like messing around with installing and configuring mining software until midnight...)
BTW - So far trying to mine Ethereum for almost 5 days on MinerGate with my GeForce GTX 1070 card only averaging about 8.87MH/s, I have only mined a total of 0.02914652 ETH (worth about $6.46).
I figure I should be getting more than that out of it!