Why is there a discrepancy between the actual mined rewards and the estimated profits from the profit calculator?

What is Profit Calculator?

The profit calculator is a tool that assists miners in estimating their daily earnings. The result is the theoretical PPS+ mining yield based on the current difficulty and the average miner fees in the last 7 days. You can access it on the ViaBTC homepage or click [Tool] - [Profit Calculator] in the top left corner. 

On the calculator page, select the coin type and fill in the relevant hashrate information to estimate your daily earnings. It supports customizing coin price, difficulty, and fee rate calculations.

Note:  The profit calculator essentially predicts future theoretical earnings based on the current situation.  It depends on various factors such as payment method, mining difficulty, miner fees, and pool luck. (detailed explanations will follow below). Therefore, there may be some margin of error, for reference only.

The Principle of Profit Calculator

The profit calculator estimates earnings via PPS+ mode. With PPS+, mining yield is composed of the block reward and transaction fee. The "block reward" is settled via PPS mode, calculated based on the theoretical earnings corresponding to the miner's hashrate. The "transaction fee" is settled via PPLNS mode, calculated based on the miner fees included in the blocks mined by ViaBTC.

When estimating earnings with the profit calculator, the block reward is calculated based on the current difficulty (or the difficulty you have set) and the hashrate you enter. The transaction fee is estimated based on the average miner fees of blocks mined by ViaBTC over the last 7 days.

Why is there a discrepancy between the actual mined rewards and the estimated profits from the profit calculator?

1. Payment Method

The profit calculator estimates earnings based on the PPS+ mode. If you choose a different payment method (ViaBTC currently supports PPS+, PPLNS, and SOLO), there may be a significant discrepancy between the estimated results and the actual earnings.

2. Fluctuations in Miner Fees

Fluctuations in mining fees due to network congestion in the BTC network are one of the significant factors that cause a significant difference between actual mining earnings and the estimated earnings from the profit calculator.

The booming popularity of inscriptions and runes in the past year has occasionally caused significant congestion in the BTC network, resulting in a sharp increase in mining fees (transaction fees). However, as the BTC network stabilizes, mining fees subsequently decrease. Since the mining fee rewards in the earnings calculator are based on the average mining fees of the last 7 days in ViaBTC, users may experience significant deviations between the estimated earnings shown and the actual earnings. This deviation will decrease as the BTC network becomes more stable. Please consider actual earnings as the most accurate reference.

3. Mining Difficulty

If there are significant fluctuations in mining difficulty, there can be a considerable discrepancy between the theoretical earnings calculated by the profit calculator and the actual earnings. The reason for this is that the ViaBTC profit calculator estimates earnings based on the current mining difficulty. However, the actual changes in difficulty may not be fully predictable or considered at the time of calculating earnings.

4. Pool Luck

The ratio between the number of daily, actually mined blocks and the theoretical number of existing blocks is known as the “luck value”. Fluctuations in pool luck can lead to an increased estimation error in the profit calculator.

If the pool luck of a mining pool decreases in the short term (below 100%), resulting in a decrease in actual blocks found, the user's miner fee earnings will also decrease accordingly, leading to actual profits lower than the estimated profits from the profit calculator. Conversely, if the mining pool luck increases in the short term, the actual profits will be higher than the estimated profits. However, in the long run, ViaBTC's pool luck is consistently above 100%.