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The past year wasn’t very bright for crypto mining enthusiasts and companies. Bear markets caused a fall in prices, and many miners faced the decision of whether they would keep mining or shut down their rigs.
It seems that the only profitable options are to place mining operations in an area with cheap electricity or resort to switching software and mining the most profitable option at the given moment, considering the pools’ fees, electricity costs, the coins you are willing to mine, and optimizing your mining as much as possible along the way. You can’t really do much about the first option, but there is plenty you can do about the second.
Where to Find the Right Coins to Mine
Usually, when miners are searching for coins to mine, they take a look at popular mining calculator pages which show them estimated earnings. Some of the most popular sites are WhatToMine, CoinWarz, and CoinCalculators. You can find a lot of ideas there, but they are all missing one important option – multi-algo pools.
Multi-algo pools are pools that allow you to mine different coins and then auto-exchange them to the currency you prefer. Some of the most popular are Mining Pool Hub, zpool, Zergpool, and BlockMasters.
To compare the estimated earnings between coins and multi-algo pools, you can check the minerstat mining calculator. It is used the same way as other mining calculators, but it will show you estimated earnings for coins and the most popular multi-algo pools.
How to Decide the Right Coins to Mine
When you are deciding which coin or multi-algo pool to choose, you will want to consider a few different things.
For Coins
- What is the volume of this coin?
- What is the market cap of this coin?
- To which wallet will you mine and what are the fees?
- On which pool will you mine and what are the fees?
- Is the pool stable?
- What is the payment method on the pool?
- What is the payout threshold on the pool?
- If you are going to sell mined coins, where will you sell them?
- Are there any exchanges that offer this coin?
- What are the fees on the exchanges?
For Multi-Algo Pools
- To which cryptocurrency will you auto-exchange the coin?
- How many miners are already mining in this pool?
- Is this pool trustworthy? Are the payments regular?
- Is the pool stable?
- What is the payment method of the pool?
- What is the payout threshold of the pool?
- What are the fees?
A question that you also need to answer for yourself is what is your hashrate? How many rigs or ASIC machines do you have?
The lower the hashrate you have, the harder it might be to reach the payout threshold if you are planning to switch between lots of options. So, if the payouts on the pool are whenever you reach 0.001 BTC, make sure to calculate (using one of the calculators mentioned above) how long it takes you to reach 0.001 BTC. If you mine in 10 pools and need to reach 0.001 BTC on all of them, it will take you five times longer to get the reward than it would if you had only mined in two different pools.
Once you answer all these questions, you will know which coins and pools are right for you and if it is worth it. Keep in mind, you don’t have to switch between hundreds of options – sometimes it is enough to switch only between two.
Which Software to Use for Mining
The last thing you need to decide is which software you will use for mining. The more coins you will include in your profit switching, the more mining clients you will need to use. Because of that, it is best to use a mining management and monitoring tool that allows you to set up different mining clients from one dashboard. Choose the solution that best fits your mining operation.
Miners have two options: Using dedicated mining OS or using Windows mining. Since the mining OS is based on Linux, it will save you from unexpected system updates and provide you with more stability. On the other hand, managing your mining operation from the Windows desktop might feel more familiar.
Different systems support different mining clients and mining clients can reach different hashrates with different overclocking and/or undervolting settings. Test out the possibilities.
