Making money mining Waves and why the WavesGo is a top pool

Why WavesGo is the highest paying Pool in Waves

I wrote this article as a guide for newcomers joining Waves and wanting to understand how to make a small profit every week simply by holding Waves, as well as to clarify some misinformation that is going around, making people think that the profits distribution by the WavesGo Pool is inferior to other pools giving away 100% of MRT (as will be discussed, it is quite the contrary).

Let's start with the basics (feel free to skip to the comparison if you are already familiar with Waves).

Mining Waves?

A lot of people ask me how much money can be made by mining Waves. I need to start by clarifying that since Waves uses POS (Proof of Stake) and not POW (Proof of Work), the term 'mining' is only being used here to mean the act of receiving payments from the network by contributing to it. In the case of POS blockhains, the contribution is running a full node with enough balance in it, whereas in POW it involves solving some mathematical problem. That's why some blockchains including NXT (that also uses POS) refers to it as 'forging' rather than mining. But I think this is academic, the vast majority of people will simply google for "mining waves" and I want them to be able to find this article.

By the way, a good place to start is the WavesGo mining calculator: www.wavesgo.com/stats.html (look under the mining stats tab).

LPOS: Leased Proof of Stake

Waves implemented something called LPOS (Leased Proof of Stake) which means that you can contribute to the network by leasing your Waves balance to someone else that runs a full node for you. So you don't have to deal with the hassle of renting and running a server but still get fees from the amount of Waves you hold.

If you own Waves and want to lease it, all you need to do is to open the official Waves Lite Client, go to the leasing tab (the icon that looks like an "L") and copy & paste the address of the pool you want to lease to. Note that your Waves never leave your account and you still own and have full control over them.

WavesGo and WavesGo Pool

WavesGo (www.wavesgo.com) is the official Waves block explorer. It is an independently-run project (i.e. not developed or maintained by the Waves team). The WavesGo team runs a Waves Mining Pool (www.wavesgo.com/mining.html) which since its inception has been the biggest pool, with currently almost 10M Waves leased to it. 

The WavesGo pool collects all the generated fees during the week and every Friday distributes them to everyone that leased their Waves the pool. Since WavesGo implemented this methodology, other pools followed suit and so most pools will collect fees and then distribute at least once per week, the difference is what each one distributes.

WavesGo also launched and manages the WGO Token (www.wavesgo.com/wgo.html) which is the project's official token in the Waves blockchain. This is the official currency of everything WavesGo related (please read the whitepaper in the link above for more info).

MRT (Miners Reward Token)

MRT is a Token issued by the Waves team, and is distributed to whoever mines a block. This token has some promised future utility, so people receiving MRT can decide to either keep it, or exchange it in the Waves Descentralised Exchange (DEX) or other exchanges that deal with MRT (e.g.: Tidex).

For more information about MRT please refer to this: https://blog.wavesplatform.com/incentivizing-pos-mining-b26f8702032c

The Comparison: WGO tips the balance towards WavesGo

Firstly, let me start by saying that it is in everyone's interest that Waves has a strong network of several full nodes, so we want other pools to exist and in fact we encourage others to have their pools, even going as far as helping other members of the Waves community getting their node setup.

We are going to look into 2 scenarios, let's see how much someone leasing 10,000 Waves would have made by leasing to one of the top pools versus WavesGo.

As a point of reference, on the week of the 12th/May WavesGo had about 9,5M Waves leased during the week and the pool generated 160,000 MRT and 140 Waves in fees during that period. Let's use these numbers to look into the following scenarios

Scenario 1: A pool giving away 100% of MRT and Waves

• 100% of MRT: 160,000 / 9,500,000 * 10,000 = 168 MRT per 10k Waves
• 100% of Waves: 140 / 9,500,000 * 10,000 = 0.147 Waves per 10k Waves

According to Cryptocompare.com, the price for MRT for that week was 0.0000229 so let's take that price:

168 MRT x 0.0000229 =  0.003847 BTC. 

The 0.147 Waves is negligible and we will simply ignore this in both scenarios.

TOTAL PROFIT: 0.003847 BTC

Scenario 2: WavesGo Distribution

WavesGo distributes WGO in addition to MRT and Waves. So let's see how the calculation looks like for someone that leased that same 10,000 Waves to WavesGo. This is what we distributed on that week of the 12th/May: 

• 50% of MRT to leasers: 80,000 / 9,500,000 * 10,000 = 84 MRT per 10k Waves
• 100,000 WGO to leasers: 100,000 / 9,500,000 * 10,000 = 105 WGO per 10k Waves
• 100% of Waves: 0.147 Waves per 10k Waves
• 25% of MRT to to WGO holders = difficult to calculate but would be at least at extra 5 MRT per 10k Waves

So in this case, the leaser got 84 MRT + 5 MRT = 89 MRT * 0.0000229 = 0.00203 BTC

But remember, there's also 105 WGO! Now, according to Cryptocompare.com the WGO price on the 12th/May was  0.0000292 BTC. Let's use that price. So this would be: 105 x 0.00003 = 0.00306

Therefore, the total that someone would get by leasing their 10k Waves to WavesGo would be 0.00203 + 0.00306 =  0.00509 BTC, about 32% higher!

TOTAL PROFIT: 0.00509 BTC

Now, one could say that the MRT and WGO price varies significantly, which is true so it's difficult to be categorical about these numbers. As a point of reference though, if we were using today's prices (21st/May/2017) according to Cryptocompare MRT is 0.00001525 and WGO is 0.000055 so then the payout in WavesGo would be 0.0071 BTC versus 0.0025 BTC for a pool distributing 100% of MRT, so you would make almost 3x as much by using the WavesGo pool!

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DISCLAIMER: I co-founded WavesGo.

www.wavesgo.com