The Salad Guide to Dynamic Earnings

Salad And Dynamic Earnings: TL;DR

Salad has leveled up our mechanics and implemented Dynamic Earnings — a suite of features and UI changes to complement our new share tracking system. Read on to learn how earnings are calculated, what Salad is doing, and how to get the most bang for your buck.

Mining States: “Prepping” & “Chopping”

Salad displays two different mining states in its UI — Prepping and Chopping — to let you know what stage of the journey your computer’s on.

Mining States Overview

• Prepping: Salad’s setup phase. This entails scoping out your rig, downloading and starting mining software, and determining which cryptocurrencies are the most profitable for your PC to mine. Don’t restart or stop Salad here, or you will lose progress.
• Chopping: We’ve confirmed that your hash power has been applied to a mining pool and your machine is submitting shares. Your Balance should increase soon — just let Salad do its thing.

Prepping the Kitchen

Unlike other miners, Salad determines which coin is most profitable for you to mine, and can put your PC to work across multiple protocols at once. During Salad’s Prepping phase, the app configures and readies your machine to start earning Balance.

5 Steps to Prep:

1. Identify your system’s capabilities and limitations
2. Download and start our suite of miners
3. Check which protocols your PC can mine on
4. Determine which coin is most profitable right now
5. Connect your PC to mining pools

Salad allows users to skip the somewhat abstruse process of setting up different wallets, troubleshooting individual miners, and evaluating what cryptocurrency yields the best profits. The app does all of that for you, and it automatically converts your earnings into Salad Balance that you can spend immediately on games and DLC via the Salad Storefront.

Chopping Salad

The Chopping phase is where your PC starts to reap rewards for its hard work. We’ll put you in whichever mining pool is poised to churn out those digital dollars.

Once your PC’s hooked up to a mining pool, you’ll begin sending hash power and submitting shares. Depending on the optimal combination of profitability, capability, and availability, you may find your PC pointed towards any one of our supported mining pools.

Pools aggregate the hash power and submitted shares of a networked group of miners. They can be somewhat difficult to set up, and individual mileage can vary depending on a miner’s hardware. Luckily, Salad handles that for you.

Chopping Pro Tips

When you click “Start,” Salad runs your machine through a few tests before it starts Chopping. Because Salad mines various cryptocurrencies with different protocols, all this logic and configuration can take a few minutes.

For best results, please run Salad for at least 30 minutes before stopping or restarting.

To power up your profits, be sure to give Salad plenty of runway to Prep. It’s a good idea to run Salad whenever you know you’re going AFK for a while, e.g.:

• while you’re at school
• during work hours
• before going to bed

Just kick back and let Salad do its thing. You’ll stir up more scratch when your PC is truly idle.

What Is My PC Actually Doing?

As your computer hashes over time, you’ll eventually start submitting shares to the pool — partial, possible solutions to the hard problems at the heart of “proof of work” cryptocurrencies.

Shares

The pool rewards miners for valid shares. The more they find, the better the rewards. A pool finds more shares by running concurrently for longer periods of time, or by amassing more hash power with better GPUs or more machines on the network. To learn more about mining pool shares, read our guide to share tracking.

Luck

There’s a reason it’s called “cryptomining” and not “cryptoprinting.” Crypto is a numbers game, and the process of finding shares involves a fair bit of random number generation. While your average earnings should remain fairly stable over time, your daily earnings may vary.

For instance, you could earn $0.30 on Monday, and make $3.00 on Tuesday. Did your PC suddenly get better at mining? Nope! It simply got more lucky. You found and submitted more shares on Tuesday, so you earned more. A low earnings day just means that the network difficulty might have been higher, or someone else got to those shares before you could.

Earnings Reports in Salad

To pay you as accurately as possible, we don’t divvy out flat earning rates. Instead, we’ll update your Balance every 15 minutes based on your submitted shares. As you can see in the chart above, these intervals will yield varied earnings. Over time, your income should average out to something approaching the expected returns for your GPU.

A Note on Mining Estimators

You should not expect to earn at the exact rate predicted by WhatToMine or other online mining estimators. Their predictions assume the best possible conditions for mining, which most of us plebeians will never achieve. Some of these assumptions include:

• properly overclocked GPUs
• undervolting for max efficiency
• mining 24 hours/day, 7 days/week
• achieving 100% luck rates

With a run of good luck, it’s even possible to blow past the rates they predict. Other times, you may come up short. In general, time is on your side — the longer you run, the closer you’ll get to that average rate. So keep Chopping!

How Is Balance Calculated?

You already know that your earnings depend on how many shares you submit to the pool. Since mining pools track shares differently, Salad automatically converts your profits into Salad Balance based on the current price of whatever cryptocurrency you’re mining. These pools also report at varying time intervals, which is why Salad updates your Balance every 15 minutes. We need time to account for reporting delays, API communication, and verification before we can harvest that fresh lettuce.

Please note: This doesn’t mean that your Balance always increases in set intervals. If your PC was unable to discover shares since the last reporting period, you’ll see no changes to your Balance for that time block.

Does Salad Charge Fees?

We’ll never charge any service fees — you get to keep all your profits. Salad makes bank elsewhere. The “dev fees” that you’ll see in your Salad log files represent transaction fees charged by our mining pools. Every pool scrapes a percentage from mining revenue to cover the costs and risks of running the network (and to make a little profit). We simply pay the operators their due before serving up your tasty Balance.

How Does XP Work?

Chefs earn one experience point (XP) per minute, but only when certain conditions are met. To earn XP, your PC must:

• have a confirmed connection with one of our mining pools
• be Chopping (actively applying hash power and submitting shares)

Since your XP rate is tied to your Chopping status, it will update in the same intervals as your Balance. Every fifteen minutes, Salad will award you XP for any shares submitted in that period. Because earnings are affected by a pool’s luck, it’s possible earn XP without earning Balance.

Example

Let’s say that our pool refreshes every ten minutes. During the last ten-minute window, three Chefs Chopped to receive these results:

• Chef A: 3 MH/s = 10 XP
• Chef B: 25 MH/s = 10 XP
• Chef C: 0 MH/s = 0 XP

Since the first two users were actively contributing hash power to the pool, they each earned 10 XP (at 1XP/min) despite yielding drastically different outputs. Chef B will earn the most Balance. Chef C couldn’t contribute hash power for this interval, so there’s no change to XP or Balance.

What’s Next?

With the introduction of robust and more accurate payouts, our Chefs can truly reap the benefits of their computers’ work.

Behind the scenes, we’re always adding further refinements to the Salad Engine — the Kitchen’s newfangled nucleus. It’s the dynamic allocation mechanism responsible for driving Chefs to the most profitable protocols today, and will one day soon herald the arrival of diversified workloads.