[NiHaoMike]

Difficulty has went up but the rate of increase is tapering off. My ASIC is handling it quite well, currently getting $50/month or so. It seems like the coin is getting dominated by GPU miners. Looks like that while there are altcoins that are more profitable to mine on a GPU, dual mining ends up with a higher total profit.

What is significant is the record high "stake payout" at the beginning of the month - a little more than $7 or nearly double what I normally get. The stake payout (for that coin at least) has to do with how the mining pool works. The pool is "pay per share" which means miners get paid for "shares" or "partial solutions". Only a tiny percentage of "partial solutions" actually solve the block. A miner that does solve the block gets a bonus on that round, but most of the block reward is shared with other miners with the remainder "staked" by the pool. After the end of the month, the staked coins get distributed to the miners based on their number of shares and hashrate consistency. (The latter discourages "coin hopping".)

The reason for the high stake payout has to do with a trick my friend coded up. The ASIC is capable of calculating nonces faster than the pool is able to accept. Thus the pool was the bottleneck. The solution was ingenious - calculate more nonces than could be submitted, then submit the ones that lead to the most favorable "Hamming distances". Alas, that trick is becoming obsolete as the difficulty increases. (If you're wondering why not just search if any of the nonces lead to solving the block, the miners don't know they solved a block until some time after they submit the winning nonce to the pool. That is to prevent an attack where rogue miners discard winning nonces in order to "steal" from the pool while losing almost nothing themselves. Miners can only statistically guess if a nonce is going to win, which means they'll lose a lot if they tried that attack.)

What gets interesting is that the fast rise in difficulty happened shortly after the exchange announced that users can donate their coins to help the hurricane victims. Also remember that the stake payouts are distributed based on shares and consistency. Therefore, at one point, my ASIC was making an estimated profit of several hundred dollars of coins per month, although I was only able to get about 1/8 of it since that's what the pool thinks it was making. I got a tiny amount of the remainder, but most of it went to other miners. A large percentage of that presumably ended up going to the hurricane victims. In other words, my friend, as beautiful as she is on the outside, is even more beautiful on the inside and her code is helping to make the world a more beautiful place. (Can't post pictures because she wants to stay anonymous. I can understand because a lot of the coiners who used to mine with their old smartphones are upset that it's no longer profitable for them and would be hostile towards the ones who made it that way. I'll just say that if you met her in the city and tried to guess what she does, you'll guess "actress" or "rock star" and not "programmer".)

I had to buy something special with the profits made from that mining venture. It had to be something I actually want and something that lasts a long time to make it memorable. The answer is obvious - a 100W solar panel. And yes, among other things, I'm planning to run my mining setups from solar.