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If you’ve read any of my previous articles, you might be aware that I tend to manage my ROLLERCOIN power with what I believe to be a logical approach. I like to compare the weekly block reward rates of each coin with the current market price for each in order to find out which of them is paying the most at any given time (as measured in the standardized RLT, the miner-buying currency). This has historically led to me leaving all 100% of my mining power pretty firmly lodged in mining RLT, as it had continued to award the most buying power for a long time.
That changed during the Season 3 update, when Polygon/MATIC was added to the RollerCoin environment.
Why RollerCoin maximizes the reward for the people mining RLT is a matter for debate at a much higher level of financial theory than I’m knowledgeable about, but I’ve given my opinion on why they prioritize their in-house token in my article on the second week of 4x DOGE reward
Whatever the case, with the addition of MATIC my power is now frequently either split between MATIC/RLT, or on 100% MATIC. Week to week, this remains the best strategy for me regardless of which coin is double-rewarded. Very frequently my analysis will show that the standardized per-block reward for MATIC is at least as profitable as the others, if not moreso.
What’s the math on that?
In my first few articles regarding this topic, I discussed how I compare each coin’s block reward in greater detail, but it comes down to a few simple things:
- The amount of the block reward (how big is the pie?)
- The value of the block reward (how much does the pie cost?)
- The percentage of the block’s mining power you are contributing (how big are the slices?)
The first item here (size of block reward) is pretty constant for each coin, and only rarely changes when a double-reward week is running. This week’s double reward is RLT, and last week’s was ETH, so the reward for RLT has increased from 30 to 60, and the reward for ETH has decreased from 0.01 back to the standard 0.005. The rest of the coins are unaffected, and continue to award 0.003 (BTC), 0.012 (BNB), 3 (MATIC), and 20 (DOGE).
The second item is variable based on the actual market values of each coin or token. Totally uncontrollable, totally unpredictable, (at least for me and most of us retail investors) what you see is what you get. To simplify, I use a standardized value based on how much of each would be used to buy 1RLT. RollerTokens are “pegged” at $1 USD, which RollerCoin can do because they’re not an actual token so they’re unaffected by market fluctuations — it costs $1 because they say it costs $1, much like other video game currencies, cars, computers, shoes, or other commodities. When the cost of a currency goes down, it takes more bits (or sats) of that currency to purchase 1RLT. When the cost of a currency goes up, it takes fewer sats to make 1RLT. If the block reward doesn’t change when the cost changes, your reward has more or less purchasing power.
As for the third item — which is the percentage of the block reward you’ll personally receive — the block-by-block amount reflects how much of the total hashrate mining that block is coming from you. For the calculations I standardize this to 500Th/s because it is an achievable number without owning too many miners or spending every second of the day playing minigames. Also, it’s easier for my human brain to keep track of that 5 than to be comparing twelve different versions of “1” against each other (see the “what is Eh/s?” section of the first mining power comparison article
So, why is MATIC so good?
All three of those factors play their own part in making MATIC a top contender for me, but it really comes down to how undervalued it is in the RollerCoin community.
The block reward for MATIC is 3, which is pretty good. Today (1/25/22) that’s about $4.50 USD. By comparison, the block reward for DOGE is 20, which is $2.75 today. Those two tokens have roughly the same amount of power dedicated to mining them (4.166 and 4.346), so hash for hash you’ll get roughly half the purchasing power from mining DOGE as from mining MATIC.
BTC, ETH, and BNB all have better or comparable block values, at 0.0003 ($10.98), 0.005 ($12.18), and 0.012 ($4.44), but they also have more mining power dedicated to them, so your piece of the pie will be smaller. Though BTC has a block reward worth more than double that of MATIC, that coin has more than three times the power dedicated to mining it. 1/10 is more powerful than 1/30.
But what about RLT?
As of this writing, RLT has 34.179 Exahash of the network power. That’s 47.7% of the entire network. So even though the block reward is worth 60RLT (which is 14 times bigger than what the MATIC reward is worth), with MATIC you’re only competing with 1/8th the power of RLT. Because of this, the personal block reward for RLT and MATIC are roughly comparable. However, I’m still mining MATIC.
Why mine MATIC if RLT is about the same?
There’s a saying in crypto that you might be familiar with, which is guiding my decision-making here. Stop me if you’re heard this one…
One Bitcoin will always be worth one Bitcoin.
With RLT tracking the US Dollar, and the value of $1 USD fluctuating like a carousel ride, it can’t truly be said that 1RLT will always equal 1RLT…. But for the purposes of buying miners within the RollerCoin game ecosystem, that’s what I’m going with. If I want to buy something in-game for 10RLT, it will always cost me 10RLT. At today’s rate of 0.70852 MATIC per RLT, that’s about 7 MATIC. But today the market is down. When the value of MATIC inevitably goes back up, each RLT will cost fewer MATIC, and that same 7 MATIC might buy me 20RLT (or more). Since I can only exchange MATIC for RLT and not the other way around, 1 RLT will always be worth only 1 RLT.
If you’re not already getting paid in crypto for your casual gaming habits, you can grab a quick thousand sats by using my link to join RollerCoin. Adopt your own Mr. Goxx (R.I.P.) and get that wheel rolling!
If you’d rather not play games with your crypto, check out some of my other favorites and faucets
