excelerator wrote:Steve Sokolowski wrote:Steve Sokolowski wrote:
That depends on the circumstances. In general, when mining is far more profitable than litecoins (like it is today for an unknown reason), then renting hashrate can result in huge profit. During other times, it can result in losses.
The rate for hashrate from providers like Nicehash tends to be constant, while profitability fluctuates. The problem is that even if you rent hashrate now, we have no idea why all the coins have become so profitable all of a sudden and because of that, profitability could suddenly drop for no reason at any time. Do so at your own risk.
I replied with another post to point out that it seems almost as if some large miner switched all its hashrate to litecoins. LTC is near all-time lows of profitability, and difficulty just skyrocketed. If that miner was mining these other coins, that might explain why profitability just went up and LTC has more hashrate now.
Do you have a link you can share to show this skyrocketing? I use bitcoinwisdom to monitor and perhaps their data is further behind than your source as this shows difficulty just coming back to the July 13th level and not particularly spikey.
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty
Litecoin difficulty fell for some reason over the past few days, and now it returned to 51,700, which is generally towards the top of the 40,000 to 50,000 range that it's been at.
I did some research and it looks like the reason for the current spike is a Bitmark bubble. Look at the chart at Bittrex for Bitmarks.
This is the second altcoin bubble in just two weeks. These things used to happen once every few months. I think that people are getting annoyed at the high fees of bitcoin and are searching for an alternative. I think I mentioned that this would happen in a blog post about a year ago - at some point, there would be a string of bubbles of one coin after another as people recognized that bitcoin wasn't serving their needs.
While I would prefer that bitcoin actually fix itself, as a result of this, we can all make tons of profit. Even though it's very hot at 85 degrees, we will still turn our miners on if profitability rises above 12 cents.