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Comment by minimax | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment on the profitability of mining Dogecoins vs bitcoins? It seems weird that mining one crypto currency would be more or less profitable (in dollars per watt terms) than another. Rational miners seeking to optimize profits would tend to mine the more profitable coin which would drive up the supply and drive down the price until an equilibrium is achieved.

edit: While we are at it, does anyone know how many dogecoins can you expect to mine per kilowatt-hour?

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There are mining pools available that automatically switch all miners to the highest profitability coin. People who utilize these pools will typically immediately cash out to less volatile options, either to BTC or fiat. (Multipool.us and Middlecoin.com are just 2 examples)

Some miners aren't in it for the immediate profitability though; While you may be able to mine .025 BTC worth of AltCoin A per day pretty regularly, I may choose to mine the much less profitable AltCoin B that only nets me .01 BTC each day because I believe holding it will make it much more valuable N months from now.

I'm currently CPU-mining (and one crappy nvidia gpu),which would net a few dollars a day at current rates. If I had serious hardware, I would imagine it would be quite profitable. I'm currently just holding onto it and tipping with it occasionally, as I find the whole thing kind of entertaining.

Mining does not drive up supply. The profitability depends on the exchange rate and current difficulty.

Think about it this way. I want to turn my electricity into dollars by mining crypto currencies. I mine some coins and then sell them to lock in the profit. Putting my freshly mined coins on the market increases the supply of coins available for purchase (and it should marginally drive down the price).

The increase in supply is fixed by the algorithm, so you're really just increasing the difficulty and making it less profitable to mine. If more people decide to buy at an exchange instead of mining, it would tend to increase the price.

Bitcoin is almost always the least profitable coin to mine.

Doge currently is the 2nd most profitable to mine:

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/

Thanks!

Much.

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