Thanks. That's a good idea.
Since WestHash is closer to me, here's how I've configured my pools now:
westhash.com p=0.0159
nicehash.com p=0.016
kano.is
f2pool.com
antpool.com
Looks like I'm all set. At least until the next difficulty change and I have to recompute the profit constant.
Of course what we need now is some event to drive rentals through the roof, like what happened with Paycoin
yeah but sometimes people do all the hash at a top rate for ½ a day you will pick up on that every time now.
philipma1957, I've got more thoughts about pool strategy. I guess I'll continue the conversation here, unless you think we should create a separate pool strategy thread.
I've had fun with the above pool strategy, but it's been a bit harrowing being primarily on a high variance pool. If it wasn't for that fairly recent string of insane luck on kano.is, I'm not sure if I'd be ahead.
I know that everyone says that variance doesn't matter, long term. But if you're gunning for a short term ROI (relatively speaking), it seems like low variance is critical as difficulty goes up.
As the difficulty was floundering up until recently, I haven't stressed too much about variance and have been playing on smaller pools. But now I'm 80 days in with my SP20 and about 75% of ROI, and the difficulty seems to be rallying a bit. So rather than gambling on smaller pools, I'm thinking of going the conservative route of low variance until I hit ROI. The problem is that I don't like contributing to the dominance of larger pools.
So here's what I'm thinking. I'll set NiceHash/WestHash as the primary, but with a low profitability threshold. I'm thinking about 1% over nominal BTC/THs/Day. With a 2% NiceHash fee, basically this means I'm agreeing to lose 1% over nominal to mine there, which seems fair. Then I'll set up f2pool.com as the secondary.
The idea here is that as long as NiceHash is doing slightly better than nominal BTC, I'll mostly be mining there. This way I'll capture nominal profits as well as any upticks. And when NiceHash is in the dumps, the miner will revert to f2pool.com. Sure f2pool.com has high fees, but if it pays for every submit that means that the fees are the only cost of frequent bouncing between NiceHash and f2pool.com.
I'm hoping that by mostly mining on a rental site, I'm effectively contributing to decentralization (hopefully), while enjoying lowering variance.
How does this strategy sound to you?