DeepOnion Mining with Nicehash: Expected vs. Actual Outcome

Recently I was interested in cloud mining and whether is profitable or not. So I decided to test it out with my current favorite project DeepOnion, which is a young and promising privacy coin.

It uses a x13 algorithm in combination with proof of stake, is mostly premined and many people say it's not profitable to mine it. Despite the bad forecast, I wanted more exact information. First of all I calculated my expected outcome. There are a few values that influence the mining reward. The main of them are the block reward, difficulty and the price of the hashing power. Taking them into account I have calculated a reward of about 15 $onions for a minimum 0.005 BTC nicehash order.

Block reward [onion]: 8 $onion
Difficulty: 115 441 (1.1510^5)
Difficulty2^32: 495 815 319 617 536 (4.96*10^14)
Price: 0.0004 BTC/GH/day
Expected reward: ~15 $onions

For further details about the calculations you can look them up in my previous post.
https://steemit.com/nicehash/@ra213/how-to-calculate-your-expected-outcome-for-nicehash-mining

Actually this was my second try to mine $onions. The first one was moderately successful, because I set up an order on a pool with only a few other miners. Compared to them my hashrate was many times higher and so I contributed to only two blocks which means my rewards depended mainly on luck. You can read about my first experience in this post.
https://steemit.com/deeponion/@ra213/my-first-cloud-mining-experience-with-deeponion

With the gained experience I thought the second try should be profitable. Luckily the price of the hashing power decreased in the meantime and I was able to buy some with a price of only 0.0002 BTC/GH/day, so only 50% of the previous order. My expected outcome should therefor double and be around 30 $onions.

To prevent the same problems as with the previous order, I decided to switch to the community pool of DeepOnion (https://onionpool.youngwebsolutions.com), because there were many other miners with a decent hashrate. After a few start-up difficulties my order received hashing power from many miners and finished just in a few hours.

After seeing that my order has finished, I immediately checked my earning on the community pool and was pleasantly surprised. I earned 30.42122232 $onions which is really close to the projected 30 $onions and with the current price I made about +20% compared to buying them on an exchange.

Excited about the results, I created another order on nicehash. Unfortunately the difficulty spiked at that time and on my third order I just received 22.940032 $onions for the same price. The following screenshot summarizes the three orders I created.

In conclusion if you constantly monitor you order and the difficulty of the network, you can mine profitable with nicehash. In total I had three orders and paid 0.015 BTC for 64.75 $onions. According to the current price of 0.00023669 BTC I made 0.0003 BTC profit.

I published this article also on the DeepOnion forum
https://deeponion.org/community/threads/deeponion-mining-with-nicehash-expected-vs-actual-outcome.32999/