Mining on Awesomehash: the pool or mining in general?
Hello Shibes,
I have been mining for several months now and have switched pools a few number of times. When RapidHash shut down, I struggled to find another pool, but ultimately found AwesomeHash and stuck with them since they were very friendly with troubleshooting some settings I had to get back up and running on their pool. Then their "merge" happened a few weeks ago, and ever since then, my payouts changed from multiple times a day to once every week. My autopayout was and is still set to 500 doge. My hash hasn't changed either, I show typically around 1MH/s on my rig, as well as on AwesomeHash's website. I do have to restart my rig once in a while when I see it is registering as 0 kH/s, but that is few and far between.
With all that said, has the mining slowed down that much where I should only be expecting about 500 doge every 7 days at my rate? It was such an abrupt change exactly when AH did the "merge-mining". Should I move to another pool to get my old payouts of ~2k doge a day?
Thanks.
Posted Oct 15, 2014, 8:54 PM UTC
TL;DR version: Mining in general. You're not likely to find any other pools with more direct doge payouts, but you will likely net more (after converting other coins received) from a pool that is currently merge-mining.
[Disclaimer: I'm not an awesomehash admin; any statements about the pool are my own understanding and interpretation of what has been discussed by the admins and others on IRC]
Prior to block 371337, you could only solve a dogecoin block (and thus receive the mining rewards) when you specifically mined dogecoin. After block 371337 (as part of the 1.8 wallet update), a method was made available that let you try to solve a litecoin block (or another scrypt coin), but that could also solve a dogecoin block at the same time with the same hash. This is known is merge-mining, or AuxPoW. The result of this change was many pools that primarily mined litecoin updated their mining operations so that they could also mine dogecoin simultaneously. This increased the dogecoin network hashrate by a factor of 10. Since the amount of dogecoin that is produced each day is relatively fixed, more hashrate chasing after the same amount of dogecoin means less doge per hash. This (along with the last halvening) is why your payouts from awesomehash have gone down.
The primary solution to the loss of dogecoin revenue is to join in and merge-mine other coins along with dogecoin, and then trade those other coins for dogecoin on an exchange. Awesomehash is trying to implement that now. The problem that awesomehash and several other dogecoin pools are having is that there is not readily available software that allows them to do that right now--there are bits and pieces that implement parts of the necessary functions, but at present nothing that implements everything that is needed in a package that all works together. Thus there are frustrating delays in getting merge-mining going.
The good news is that the problem is solvable, so it should only be a matter of time before the software support is available. The bad news is that the time is not now, and it is not clear how long it will take. It would be totally understandable if you choose to mine somewhere else until the pool gets everything in place, but if you do, please consider coming back once it is.