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If I have access to currency-specific variables/datasets for any cryptocurrency of choice (see below), how would I calculate which cryptocurrency (out of a fixed set of say 3-5 altcoins -- SHA-256 and Scrypt only) would be most profitable to mine at a given time?
Given: difficulty, hash rate (network), block count, block time, block reward, exchange rate, and exchange volume.
To be more specific, I'm wondering what math would go into calculating Expected Earnings/(MH/sec) for each cryptocurrency with this data? I'm not not necessarily asking for something like http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/ that takes your own device's hash rate and power consumption:power cost ratio to determine individual profitability, I'm talking about a general calculation where the output is in the units 'Expected Earnings/(MH/sec)'
(I'm not sure how complicated a calculation like this is, so I'm not asking for exact math or anything just where/how to start with a problem like this)
How would difficulty be factored into this? – None – 2016-06-11T15:25:03.873
1Difficulty is a scaled version of the network hash rate over a window of the last N blocks (typically). Assuming difficulty retargets often enough, there's close to no lag. For small hash rate coins, it might make a difference if the network hash rate varies wildly intraday though. – user36303 – 2016-06-11T15:51:29.557
How is the answer you provided different from [(S/(D4295))86400RP], where S is your hash rate (in MH/sec), D is the difficulty rating, R is the block reward, and P is the price in USD of a single coin? This seems to be the standard formula for determining average profit per day. (Sorry to be asking so many questions here, just new to the topic in general) – None – 2016-06-12T20:02:26.087
1It looks pretty similar, except the 4295 which seems a bit out of place. That might be a particular coin's difficulty vs network hash rate's scale. Typically, the difference is the block time (ie, difficulty = block time times hash rate), but a block time of 4295 would be uncommon, but maybe some coins have a different scaling there. – user36303 – 2016-06-12T21:56:17.367
The 4295 is an approximation of (2^32)/1000000 (which is 2^32 adjusted for 1MH/sec)––I believe the calculation for difficulty is [(block time * hash rate)/2^32], except this is scaled to MH/sec in this case. – None – 2016-06-13T02:28:29.930