I hesitate to even share this, as I don't want to draw attention to what I feel is a growing cancer in the crypto-space... Large Auto-switching Mining Pools. Let's call them LAMPs for short. Independent smaller scale BTC/LTC mining is pretty much dead. But you can make real money without a huge investment by mining altcoins with multi-GPU rigs. The LAMPs provide software which allows your mining rig (or even just your gaming computer when you're not playing games) to mine whatever is most profitable at the time, and holds the coins for you until you earn enough for a payout. Easy, right? Sure. Smart? Probably not. I won't name any LAMPs as I don't want to promote them. You can look into them yourself if you want but please don't. Here's why.
Picking the most profitable coin to mine at the moment and either keeping that coin or converting to BTC is not the best long-term strategy to make your hash-power produce the most value. What if you mine an alt that goes on a big run for a week and is profitable at the time, accumulate a few hundred dollars worth of a coin that goes belly up? Wasted time and energy. What if you put it all into BTC and the alto coin goes to the moon? Lost profit. You don't want those scenarios. LAMPs do not prevent them. In fact they hinder your ability to apply your own intelligence to your own hash-power to avoid these scenarios.
Even if you are super bullish on BTC and bearish on alts and only in it to make profit--tightly controlling the coins you mine and keeping an eye on the markets to decide when to trade the alts for top-ten coins will increase your margins by possibly hundreds of percentage points. Instead of mining the coin that is the most profitable right now, I spent time researching coins to find ones that have a real future--coins that have been more resistant to volatility--and I mine those.
There are some LAMPs that come close to getting it right, but their high fees outweigh the convenience and "smartness" of their smart miners. And even if it doesn't matter to you ideologically, letting a large private corporation have control over the coins that your miner is producing puts those coins at risk. Even if you cash out to USD and put it all in the bank, producing the most USD per day is not the "smartest" thing to do. If you are mining crypto, you had better believe that crypto is money 2.0. Producing coins that have real utility and appeal, then working to promote those coins and build a community... Using the value that is being created to drive private enterprise and philanthropic missions that don't eminate from green-washing corporations. That is the crypto revolution that changes the world. Going after the most dollars all the time is not the wisest strategy. The state of the world today makes that abundantly clear to me.
Let's talk briefly about risk. LAMPs hold your coins until you reach a payout threshold. Unless you have a lot of money invested in mining equipment you are probably going to have to wait weeks for a payout. During that time your crypto is not yours, and you cannot secure it. A LAMP which I will not name recently got hacked and lost over $60,000,000 of their customers' money. Sure it was easy to start mining with their service. But oops, it's all gone now... You can do what's easy (LAMPs) or do what's right. They are sometimes the same thing but usually not.
More importantly, let's talk about what large mining pools do to the crypto-space. In short, they destabilize and centralize the mining of alts. LAMPs throw tremendous hash power at a coin, we'll call it Coin A--the LAMP pool becoming the largest node in the network--which pushes mining difficulty higher to keep block times stable. When difficulty becomes higher mining profit margins will decrease. When profit margins decrease, the LAMP pool takes all of its workers out of Coin A's network and puts them into Coin B. Coin A's network is left with high difficulty and greatly reduced hash-power. Until its difficulty is re-balanced to account for the lost hash-power, Coin A's network slows down greatly since there is not enough hash-power to find blocks at the current difficulty. The previous miners of Coin B now see reduced profits as their network is diluted with a huge amount of hash-power. Then the LAMP drives Coin B's difficulty high enough to reduce profitability and moves on to Coin C, and Coin B's network is not able to solve blocks quickly at the higher difficulty and it slows the coin's network down until it can re-balance difficulty. The LAMP moves on to Coin C, Coin D, etc.
Through this process the LAMPs are ensuring the future centralization, destabilization, and corporatization of all cryptocurrencies. The only real resistance is a coin with strictly controlled mining regulations or one that uses proof-of-stake instead of proof-of-work so cannot be mined. Unless miners get "smart" and stop using LAMPs in favor of applying their own intelligence and foresight into what they mine, the long-term future of mining looks to be either centralized / corporate or completely dead. To be honest I would rather see good coins switch to proof-of-stake--rewarding holders and doing away with mining--than have the crypto space overrun by large non-human corporate structures.
If you don't understand any of the terms used in this article, please look them up. LAMP is an acronym I made up, you won't find that one.