Could you explain to me why someone would offer their hashing power on NiceHash vs. just directly working for a pool?

The main cases I image are:

1. The miner doesn't want to deal with price fluctuations and wants to prevent arbitrage risk

2. It might be more profitable to outsource smallish coins that have to buy hashing power to stabilize their network (though that would probably also be covered by the profit switcher)

3. Money laundering <--- Which I assume is the biggest portion

Weirdly I can somewhat answer this as I’ve just got into NiceHash since this Friday night, mainly as a learning experience more than a money making endeavour. I have a load of my own company PCs with GPUs like 1080s and 2070s we used to rent for VR usage at events that have basically been sitting in boxes, idle for the last 12 months due to COVID. No idea how I ended up down the mining rabbit hole on a Friday night, maybe a comment here...

Anyway, I now have six machines set up in my (previously... freezing cold garage), generating around £20 to £25 day total, after electricity costs. I’m on a metered power supply that is much cheaper at nighttime.

The benefits of NiceHash are:

- super simple set up. Literally an installer, it benchmarks the machine and gets to work in minutes. They have their own OS as well. That’s a rabbit hole for a few evenings this week to have some fun with.

- mobile app for monitoring all your rigs - temperatures, profitability, etc.

- pretty decent web front end for tracking progress, crypto prices, rig stats, etc.

- automatic switching between the most profitable algorithms in real-time. If the market are paying money for a specific currency/algo, it will swap to where the money can be made quickly and automatically without you needing to be involved.

- easy to disable specific algorithms that don’t work well. First day it kept jumping to KawPow, but for me this was really poor for profitability on my hardware, so it’s literally a click to disable that algorithm in their software.

I guess it just works, is largely set and forget, but offers lots of tweaking, monitoring for those with the desire to do that. Is it the most efficient or profitable? I’m starting to think not, but I’m still at the bottom of the curve for all of this, however, NiceHash has provided the perfect springboard into a new (to me) world.

BTW, I am fairly anti crypto in general. I’m kind of doing this as a learning experience while I have some free hours to burn each week on learning about something I feel I should know a lot more about while having a bit of fun in the process.

Thanks for explaining! I would have assumed that there are some cross-coin mining pools out there that have a similarly good UX, where you would end up with the mined coins directly, but it kind of makes sense that it exists on that abstraction level.

There's other mining software and native OS's out there, like minerstat that you can seperately link to NiceHash or other pools, that abstract it all a level further, swapping between pools based on profitablity and probably over a year offer a better pay out, but I've not started diving into that yet. Minerstat charge 1.65eu per worker/per month after the first rig, but seem to offer a lot more options/flexibility (more stats, more pools, etc.).

I honestly don't understand who's buying the hash power on the other side. I think people start with Nicehash because it's PnP and easy to use. From there you can look at Minerstat which mines directly on pools and offers features like triggers and fancy graphs.

Setting up a miner yourself doesn't take much work but it won't have profit switching or extra cloud features that Nicehash or Minerstat have.