Things to know before you rent a rig

What coin you want to mine

There are many factors that go into deciding what coin you want to mine, but ultimately that is up to you to decide. When renting, it is highly unlikely that you will earn a profit if you’re mining one of the primary coins such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, etc. The reason behind this is that most rig owners list their rigs at rates slightly higher than what mining those coins themselves would return. Afterall, rig owners want to earn profit too.

What algo is used to mine that coin

All mineable crypto currencies use some specific mining algorithm. Bitcoin, for example, uses the SHA256 algorithm while Litecoin uses the SCRYPT algorithm. Once you have identified the coin you want to mine, a quick google search (or a pool you want to use) should quickly identify the algorithm used to mine that coin.

Where to mine -- what pool to use

Our platform uses the stratum protocol for mining. As such, every rental must be pointed to a stratum based pool of some sort. Once you have identified the coin you want to mine, you then need to find a pool that is mining that coin. Your pool will provide you with 3 important pieces of information needed for your rental.

1. Stratum address and port

2. Workername to use so that it can credit you for the mining

3. A worker password (optional in most cases)

MiningRigRentals.com provides a unique marketplace for renters and rig owners. We facilitate a safe transaction similar to an escrow service.

Choose the algorithm of the coin you wish to mine and filter the results. Now you can review mining rigs that are listed for rental. We provide renters with tools such as our average hashrate graph, view rental history, and the rigs RPI. Not only can you safely narrow your choices but we also act as a 3rd party mediator of transactional funds should there be a discrepancy between what you paid for and what you received. Once you've selected the rig you wish to rent, you can follow the onscreen instructions to make the exact payment.
Once there is confirmation, the mining rig will automatically switch to the pool of your choice.

In order to begin renting here at MiningRigRentals, you may deposit the funds you wish to use to purchase a rental contract into your account.

To begin, navigate to your accounts Balance page, locate the coin address used to deposit funds to your account. We also have provided a barcode for compatible devices to use.

Send the amount you wish to have available for renting to the listed address along with the necessary blockchain transaction fee from your client. (We list a suggested value on your balance page).
Transactions take only a few confirmations on the blockchain to be posted to your account. We may periodically raise the minimum confirmations required if the network situation changes. 

Once the amount has confirmed, our system will make those coins available in your balance, you may then begin to purchase rentals. If you are ever done renting for an extended time, please withdraw your unused portion of balance to your own wallet.

Great! You're one step closer to mining at your pool of choice. Input the exact number of hours you would like to rent the mining rig.
Proceed by clicking "Rent" The next page will allow you to enter 5 total pools. In the first pool #1 spot, enter the pool you wish to immediately begin mining at. The other slots are backup pools should your proceeding pools of choice fail or become unavailable. This is an excellent way to ensure you get up and mining immediately on a coin launch. 

Finish the rental process by clicking on "Instant Pay." That's it! You're on your way to mining, it has never been simpler.

What is a pool?

A pool is a website where you would point your mining hash power at. Generally you get paid by the pool for your fair share of the work you submitted on a regular basis, as opposed to mining without a pool where earnings are irregular.
The type of pool you choose is important. Some pools are specific for different algorithms, or coins, others boast a wide range of mining possibilities. You want to choose a pool that matches the rigs algorithm or vice versa.

Choosing the right pool is the most important decision you need to make when mining. We offer some suggested pools at the Pools & Services page. These are a starting point for you to look at if you don't know where to start. 
The other decision to make is how much will you make. It's important to take a look at the going rate that you are paid at your pool, this means for the particular coin are getting in return for pointing hashrate there, and the current market rates for those coins.
We offer some other tips about how to maximize profits in our Help center.

In order to use a pool, you would need to signup an account on their page, or some allow mining direct to a bitcoin or altcoin address for payments made directly to you from the pool.
Consult the pools page in order to find the information you need to setup a rental pointed to that pool. 
You would look for a configuration page where you can add a pool worker, also the page where the address details for the pool - and the coin you want to mine there. This information is used to point a rental to your pool.
As mentioned some allow using a payout address directly without an account at the pool.

Still confused? Open a ticket with us and we will try to answer your questions.

Unsupported pools

• p2pool
• Nicehash Dagger-hashimoto Ethash
• IP Address pool

Now that you have rented your first rig, you should now see it to begin hash at your pool.

There are a few things to note as important about rentals. Some rigs may take up to 10 minutes to begin hashing, this is more true if the rig is not already mining through the rig owner's pool interface. Some owners chose to not use our interface for whatever reason, however in this case their rig will connect to see if it's rented periodically. Once they connect it will begin to hash at your configured pool.
Should the rig go offline immediately after the rental starts, the system should cancel and refund the rental. Though, if it has not, please submit a ticket about the issue. 

We can also not extend a rental, only the rig owner can extend your rental. These extensions by the rig owner are for compensation for their rig being offline. If rig has gone offline for a long period, over 4 hours, please open a ticket with support so we can cancel and refund the rental.

We provide a live hashrate graph so that you can see the hashrate within seconds of it being generated. In addition you can see on the workers tab the individual miner connections, and see the hashrate of each device, along with it's work difficulty set by Your pool. Some connections may be from devices disconnecting and reconnecting, closed connections disappear after a while. 
The description tab may contain important information by the rig owner, such as work difficulty settings.

Keeping the rental going well. An important step as a renter is to make sure that you have selected a stable pool. Pools that are offline, the rig is not able to connect to and generate work for you. You should utilize our backup pool system so that in the event one of your pools goes offline, the rig can continue to work for you. Some pools may also be broken, usually in these cases you may not see any hashrate on the graph, but the rig is still listed as being online. Choosing a pool that has an interface so you can tell that it is working is important. We are not able to offer refunds for issues relating to your pool. 

The important step of work difficulty settings, with the wide range of speeds of rigs available on MiningRigRentals, there is the need to know about work difficulty settings. These are set on your pool interface, the higher the speed of the rig, the higher the work difficulty. We have provided the rig owner the ability to set the suggested work difficulty for you. This can be seen in the rig properties section. Some pools have auto/variable difficulty, and generally you won't need to set work difficulties. 
If you need to set work difficulties in your pool interface, and you do not know the right one, experiment with the values from lowest to highest. We do have a help center Faq Here that may help.
Some pools you can set the difficulty via the password d=### or diff_#### are examples of some, check your pool documentation.

From here you can continue to monitor the operation of your rental from the rig view. We also have a separate page that represents the rental as itself, you can click on Go To Rental to view this, this is the screen we usually look at when reviewing rentals for you.
You can also click on My Rentals to have an overview of all your rentals, including a live hashrate graph of all your rentals.

Once the rental is finished, we will review the rental within the 12 hour post review period and issue any refunds if there were issues with the rig due to the rig being offline, or not producing hash at a consistent rate before and after your rental.

Refund Policy

Our system accurately tracks accepted shares. Shares are the units of work marked as completed at your pool made by the rig.

The work expected for a rental is pre-computed at the beginning of the rental. For a normal length rental we display this as the "average hashrate." The value reflects the work received during the active length of the rental. Average hashrate is tied to the rental length. If the rental length varies through purchased extensions or a rental cancellation, we show the average during the active length and not the total length. This means that the average can show some value, but if there was remaining time in the rental that was cancelled the actual total work received does not reflect the "average hashrate". These values (Average hashrate and our internal share unit count) are used to compute the total work received when issuing any refunds.
Note that a rental is considered completed, or satisfied when the total time of the rental has elapsed and the average hashrate is 100% or above, no refunds will be issued, unless there was a gross over or understatement of the hashrate by the rig owner.

There are two components in a rental, first component is the rig, the other is the pool.
We do not offer refunds for pool related issues; as it is your responsibility to add stable, online, and working pools using the correct work difficulties for the rented rig. Utilizing our backup pool system significantly reduces pool related hash-rate loss. We offer a pool test when you add a pool into a pool list page. If your pool information is not valid in some way it will notify you. If you are unsure why there is an error, please contact support. 
The second component to a rental is the rig. If the rig is offline for some period (shown on the graphs as orange bar and no hashrate), or if the rig consistently shows a pattern of not hashing at the advertised speed, specifically when not rented then we use that data to calculate eligibility for a refund.

Refunds are prorated based on the difference between the work expected for the length of the rental purchased and the shares accepted by your pool. If the rig owner extends your rental to cover for losses then that time is added to the total work received. 
We do not offer full refunds, generally speaking. A full refund can only occur if the rig was offline 100% of the time and did not produce any shares at your pool. 

Guidelines

Active rental

If you rent a rig that shows offline status for at least 20 minutes during the first 30 minutes of the rental, the rental will be canceled and you will be refunded. This process is automatic and is based on the rig showing as offline status. The rig not hashing is not the same as being offline. If the rig is online and not hashing, it will not auto cancel, as there is likely an issue with your pool.

If more then 15 minutes have passed since the start of the rental and there is no hashrate, please open a ticket with support to request us to review the situation. Please note that some rigs may take up to 30 minutes to start. If you have some other problem during an active rental such as a rig going offline after it had been previously working and its been at least 30 minutes, or some other hashrate related problem please open a ticket with support to request us to review the situation. If you want us to cancel and refund the rental (if applicable) please indicate to us by clicking the appropriate button on the ticket page on the rental, or telling us directly in a ticket opened through the ticket support center at the top help page. Please note that we would like to give the owner of a rig a chance to rectify any situation where a reduction in hashrate is caused by a problem on their side, please consider waiting a little longer to see if they solve the problem. You may contact the rig owner to see if they can solve the problem before opening a ticket. 

Completed rental

Each rental that has completed its rental period has what we call a "12 hour post rental review period" this period allows us to review and provide support for completed rentals. We manually review all applicable rentals that had reduced hashrate within this 12 hour period and may provide a refund for any offline time, or missing hashrate in rentals for which the rig was at fault for as a service to our renters. We generally only review rentals that complete below 95% of the advertised hashrate, or have at least a few minutes of rig offline time, it is however at Mining Rig Rentals discretion when to review or provide a refund. 
Once we review the rental and determine it is eligible, we will refund exactly what you are owed as a percentage of the average hashrate, based on factors relating to rig owner issues like being offline, or low hashrate that can be determined by reviewing the hashrate of their other rentals or non rented periods. 

On your "Recently completed rentals" tab, for each rental we show a status. A rental that was provided a refund will show Refunded and the amount as a percentage refunded. A rental that is suspected as having a hashrate problem will show Pending Review, this means the rental is in our review queue in which we manually review all poorly performing rentals. Please wait up to 8 hours for us to review these rentals before opening a ticket to request a refund. When we have reviewed a rental, it will indicate Reviewed or Completed, this means we reviewed the rental but did not determine there to be a problem with the rig and is ineligible for a refund at the time of the review. If the status shows Completed Successfully, this means that the rental completed above our review threshold and is considered to have satisfied the rental contract. 

We allow up to 5% variation in hashrate (or any value at Mining Rig Rentals discretion depending on circumstances) to rigs that consistently hash at or above their advertised rates to compensate for issues that are outside of the rig owners control such as pool latency, stale shares, rejects and other pool related issues that can and often do occur. Generally speaking, a rig must provide at least 100% of its advertised hashrate in a rental in which there were no renter related pool problems. Our 5% allowance does not mean a rig should only provide 95%, a rig must on average provide 100% (as mentioned -- as per when there are no renter related pool problems). We generally, at our discretion, provide prorated refunds for any offline time that a rig has, regardless of any allowance. As such, we specifically review each and every rental and should a rented rig show a consistent pattern of marginally less than advertised then we do not apply the grace range and refund accordingly.

Should you feel that you need a refund for partially delivered hash rate and or downtime or are not satisfied with the review status, simply open a ticket for our review. Please open this ticket within 12 hours of the rental completing or we will not be able to refund you since the rig owner is then paid after 12 hours and there will be no funds for a refund: This is our rental holding period, it is assumed that after 12 hours and if there have been no disputes, the rig owner is paid as the contract is considered complete. Opening a ticket for a refund before we have completed our review may delay processing on your or others requests, please consider waiting for us to review your rental first. 

If you have a rig and you received a refund in which you do not agree with, please open a ticket so that we can review the situation, however we do not intend to make mistakes with refunds. If we determine the refund was invalid we will rectify the mistake, if the refund was valid please accept our review.

We provide ticket support 8am to 10PM EST/New York. If you open a ticket during our off hours, it may take some time for us to answer. Regardless we attempt to answer all tickets within 12 hours. You can review our page 'How to get support' 

Unfortunately, this is not possible. The mining rig you rented is configured by it's owner to mine a specific algorithm. You're welcome to contact them but we will be unable to switch your payment amounts and totals.

Make sure you have a second pool in your pool list. If your main pool fails to provide work to our system, our system will disconnect the rig owner's mining rig. If you have a second pool set it will automatically switch to the second pool. It is critical to set more than one pool because of this!
If you have two pools listed and you're sure both pools are functioning properly, please then contact the rig owner immediately. It's our experience that rig owners tend to be just as concerned about down time as their renters are.
If you've set two pools and the rig owner is unresponsive and the rig is still offline please submit a ticket to support.

To provide rig owners with a complete opportunity to compensate time, refunds are usually to be processed until after the rental period has completed.
We many refund and cancel the rental if it has been offline for a long period of time.

There are a lot of variables to the hashrate. It is not uncommon for the hash rate to be 10%-15% above or below the previous 24 hour chart. . Factors such as pool choice, coin difficulty, latency from your pool choice etc could play a major factor in the variation. If you don't feel something is fair, try contacting the rig owner.

We currently accept BTC (Bitcoin), LTC (Litecoin), ETH (Ethereum), BCH (Bitcoin Cash), DASH (Dash) for purchasing rentals at MiningRigRentals.

Cryptocurrency space has changed over the years, coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum have become very popular. These are the post popular coins to use here at Mining Rig Rentals, however consider choosing Litecoin, or BCH to deposit as fees may be lower with those coins.
If you need to obtain altcoins, there are a number of ways to do so. The most popular way is to sign up with an exchange, where you can depsosit funds and purchase one of the coins we offer on our site for payments.

You could try visiting ShapeShift and instantly convert your favorite altcoin into BTC or vice versa, just input your MRR Deposit address.
Note that we are not associated with this service and take no responsibility for any third party service, we provide it to you for information only. 

We are an advanced service for pooled mining only. We only support stratum based pools for most algorithms. Mining to a wallet is not possible unless you setup your own private pool to your wallet. 

If you want to setup a private pool, we suggest using UNOMP or MPOS

Yes, there is a 3% fee charged to renters on rental transactions. This fee is typically not refunded unless the rig completely malfunctions or there is an error on our part.
Why is there a fee? We offer the best support to our users, and will continue to improve and add new features to our service, in order to aid in this we charge a small fee.

We cannot offer conversions from one currency to another. You would have to withdraw your balance and do the conversion necessary and redeposit the result to your account.
 
We're looking into offering this in the future, however legal requirements like KYC would be required.