I created a Ravencoin mining Monte-Carlo simulation and put it online for everyone

Hi everyone —

TL;DR – I put together a Ravencoin mining simulation using a Monte-Carlo approach, and put it online for everyone to use at www.miningmontecarlo.com/rvn.

It's not particularly pretty, it was written in hand-typed html and python, but it makes a few pretty graphs. Definitely not perfect, but it's free, so enjoy!

Long version:

With all the mining questions around about profitability and what happens when ETH goes to PoS and all the hashrate comes spilling over to … everything … I figured I'd put together a simulation so I could make my assumptions about various parameters and see what happened to my future Ravencoin profitability. I have mined just a tiny bit of Ravencoin (I'm mostly mining ETH right now) but I'm interested in sorting out when / how to get in and what to expect once the ETH switchover happens.

Since there's so much uncertainty about really significant parts that really affect the outcome, it didn't seem fitting to make a single run, so I set it up as a Monte Carlo. The values I put in as defaults are just intended as a starting point for something somewhat reasonable — you can punch in your hashrate, power, and your assumptions about the average values (means) and standard deviations (spread in values) that you think are appropriate and it'll run a few hundred to a thousand randomized runs and pop out a range of possible outcomes in a few seconds. A howto spells out how the inputs and outputs work and there's a little algorithm description diagram so you can trace how it works at a high level if you're interested.

It has built in timeline for the upcoming RVN halving, you can adjust your assumptions about profit rise at that time (we know what'll happen to block reward, we don't have to guess at that one !) It'll also allow you to make assumptions about how much ETH network hashrate comes over to RVN, and it has a scaling function that decreases RVN profit accordingly. This is a critical one, of course, that has a huge impact on earned RVN depending on the assumption.

Then it'll spit out a nice little table and a few graphs.

I built a version for ETH also (and that's still there too, at the same base url), but since they're really somewhat similar calculations at their core, I figured it'd be straightforward to apply to the Raven, so here it is.

In any case, feel free to give it a run. Usual caveats apply – I'm not a financial advisor, won't predict the future, and etc — the tool is just for fun!