Estimated mining profits are overestimated

Question

I mine with 1KH/s for moneropool.com. The estimated mining profit should be about 0.12 XMR/day, but I'm getting much lower profits, only about 0.04 XMR/day.

The site says that on average every 40 minutes a block is found, but I often see that the last found block was 3 or 4 hours ago.

So, whats wrong here?

Answer 1

On the "Pool blocks" page, you can see in the last column the luck indicator, which is essentially the number of hashes produced by the pool to mine that block vs. the difficulty of the block.

They seem to just have gone through an unlucky sequence with fewer blocks found than expected.

A few notes on this:

• there will always be an element of luck in finding the next block, but over time the frequency of blocks should be close to the estimated value
• for example, at 2 MH/s vs network hashrate of 50 MH/s, they would find a block every 50 minutes on average, with a ca. 2% probability to find no block for 4h or more, and 15% for 2h
• the longer you mine, the closer you should get to your 0.12 a day
• the "faster" the pool, the quicker you will get close to your average thanks to the pool "smoothing" of large random events - but the pool you mention looks reasonably large at the moment so shouldn't be a problem
• it can never be completely ruled out that the pool is cheating: they may have changed the code of the pool to skip blocks from time to time (I'm not saying it's the case here), they could also change the luck indicator; you can (and should) look at block history and compare the average frequency over time vs their speed to get a feeling of their honesty.