Here is hopefully a definitive answer to whether NiceHash is more or less profitable than some other popular multi-algo mining pools. I produced a chart (normalizing the start balance in each pool to zero) over the gains from a few days:
https://imgur.com/a/oiFdq(monitoring was off between 5am and 8am on 21st February hence the slight jump there)
This data is a few days old now but the principle is valid.
Methodology:
One GTX 1070 per pool. All pools mined simultaneously.
All pools set to BTC payout where applicable.
Awesome Miner Professional Edition used as front-end. I selected miners that are benchmarked most profitable for each card as follows:
Excavator 1.4.4a - LyraREv2, Neoscrypt
CcMiner Alexis - Nist5, Quark, Qubit
DSTM Zcash Cuda Miner - Equihash (for me this is slightly faster than the EWBF version)
DaggerHashimoto / Ethhash - Claymore Dual Ethereum Miner
CcMiner - all other algorithms
The chart includes MPH's 0.9% + 0.2% exchange fees, and AHashPool's 1% fee. It does not include NiceHash's 2% fee as this is charged when disbersed to the internal wallet. None of the amounts consider any withdrawal fees.
The balances were obtained by querying each pool's API every 60 seconds.
There is no question that NiceHash is the most profitable "pool". It's interesting that so many experienced miners claim otherwise, as I've only been mining for two months myself and the data is available for all to see if you take the time to research it. NiceHash is - as others have mentioned - more profitable because buyers currently overpay for hashrate. The situation may or may not change in future.
Please note that the chart for AMD cards will look different, and also note that if you use NHM or NHLM you may not be using the most profitable back-end miner especially if you are mining Equihash or DaggerHashimoto.
Excavator specifically blocks use for mining on MPH so I made a workaround to enable that, so all miners were available for all pools.
Switching parameters:
- 15 minute interval
- 10% profit switch threshold
Hardware:
- 3x Asus GTX 1070 Dual OC
- 80% TDP, +90 core clock, +400 mem clock
For anyone considering switching to another pool, I hope this experiment helps inform your decisionmaking.
This is some very nice data for profit switching miners. Use it to the best of your ability. It looks like Nicehash offers the best profits overall? OP has stated that they will retry this test with more GPUs when they get their hands on them in a few weeks.