Multipool.US Mining vs WeMineLTC.com Mining – Which is More Profitable?

I have been mining Litecoin (LTC) at WeMineLTC.com for a couple of months now and I noticed that the difficulty has been increasing pretty rapidly recently.

In layman’s terms, difficulty is the number of KH/s required to mine a portion of a coin.  The difficulty increases as more people mine the coin.  The more KH/s that go in on a macro level, the higher the difficulty goes.

Because of the increase in difficulty, my 18,000 KH/s went from earning about 5.5 LTC/day ($90.75/day) to about 3.8 LTC/day ($64.6 /day) (note that USD exchange rates changed as well – that’s why the math isn’t perfect).

That’s quite a drop in my ROI as I work toward paying off all of the equipment I invested in to achieve an 18 MH/s hashing rate.  I started to wonder if it might be more profitable to mine other alt coins that offer lower difficulties but have much, much lower USD exchange rates on far more sketchy exchanges.

The Test – Multipool.us vs WeMineLTC.com

I decided to create an account on Multipool.us and test the theory.

Multipool.us is a switching pool.  That means that I point my 18 MH/s at their servers and they use that mining power to mine whichever junk alt coin offers the highest profitability at that moment based on difficulty.

If you are unfamiliar with the various alt coins that are out there, check out www.coinwarz.com to see which coin offers you the best theoretical ROI for your hashing power at this moment.

I allowed my rigs to mine at Multipool for 24 hours.  Through Multipool I earned LTC, Doge, AUR, TIPS, and DGC.

After the test period I withdrew all available coins to my local wallets and then sent them to the exchange www.cryptsy.com to convert them into LTC at current market rates.  Obviously, I just sent the mined LTC coins to my LTC wallet.

What Were the Results?

After converting all of the coins to LTC and sending them to my wallet I netted about 1.8 LTC for the 24-hour mining period.  I was actually disappointed with those results.  I expected the mined total to be higher than the 3.8 LTC I would have received mining on WeMineLTC.com.

The result was 1.8 LTC in 24 hours of mining on Multipool.us when that same hash rate could have earned 3.8 LTC at WeMineLTC.com.

Besed on these results, it was obviously more profitable to generate LTC directly at WeMineLTC rather than generating the most profitable coin at any moment and then converting those coins to LTC through Cryptsy.

It is important to note that WeMineLTC.com is a 0% fee pool and Multipool.us is a 1.5% fee pool.  That means 1.5% of my KH/s are given to Multipool.us instead of making their way to my wallets.

It is also important to note that I did lose multiple fees to Cryptsy through converting the various coins to LTC.

Even when those fees are added back in, it was still vastly more profitable to mine at WeMineLTC.com.

Other Considerations For Multipool.us

This article was about short-term profitability – not long-term value.  BTC and LTC have established themselves at present as the most highly valued coins.