Even though this past year wasn’t a very positive one for the cryptocurrency space, the crypto miners and mining firms had an even worse time! Due to the prolonged bear market and the massive drop in prices, many miners are either facing the music and shutting down their shops or keep on fighting in the hope that mining would become profitable again.

As written by the Daily Hodl, “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.” Although there isn’t a lot you can do about the first option, there is a lot that you can do about the second.

What to Mine

When miners search for coins to mine, they will commonly take a look at the popular mining calculator pages which will let them know about the estimated earning. The most popular sites are CoinCalculators, CoinWarz and WhatToMine. There are a lot of ideas that you can take from these sites but they all seem to miss out one important option, multi-algo pools.

Multi-algo pools allow you to mine different coins and then auto-exchange them to the currency you prefer. Some of the most popular are zpool, Zergpool, BlockMasters and Mining Pool Hub. if you want to compare the estimated earning between coins and multi-algo pools, then you can check the minerstat mining calculator. This is used in the same way as other mining calculators but it will show you estimated earning for coins and the most popular multi-algo pools.

There are several things to consider when trying to decide what coin or multi-algo pool to choose including:

If you are going to sell mined coins, where will you sell them?

Are there any exchanges that offer this coin?

To which wallet will you mine and what are the fees?

What is the volume of this coin?

What is the market cap of this coin?

What is the payout threshold on the pool?

On which pool will you mine and what are the fees?

Is the pool stable?

What is the payment method on the pool?

What are the fees on the exchanges?

Now, the above is what you want to think of when it comes to coins but for Multi-Algo pools, you will need to consider:

To which cryptocurrency will you auto-exchange the coin?

How many miners are already mining in this pool?

What is the payout threshold of the pool?

What are the fees

Is this pool trustworthy? Are the payments regular?

Is the pool stable?

What is the payment method of the pool?

This might seem like a lot an the funny thing is, is that there is more to consider! For example, what is your hashrate? Or how many rigs or ASIC machines do you have set up?

As the Daily Hodl write:

“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.”

After you are able to answer all these questions, then you will know which coin and pool is right for you.