How the opportunity score works

Every mining opportunity on minerstat carries a score from 0 to 100. It sits next to the profit figure, and it is there for one reason: profit alone is not enough information to make a good mining decision.

This post explains what goes into the score, how to read it, and why the most dangerous rows in any profitability table are the ones with a huge profit and a low score.

Why profit alone lies

A daily profit estimate is a chain of inputs multiplied together: your hashrate, the network difficulty, the block reward, and a market price to convert the mined coins into currency you care about. If any link in that chain is weak, the final number inherits the weakness while looking exactly as precise as a trustworthy one.

The classic failure modes:

• The price comes from one small exchange where a few hundred dollars of volume moved the ticker 30 percent.
• The network hashrate collapsed an hour ago, difficulty has not adjusted yet, and the current profit spike will be gone before your rigs finish switching.
• The coin trades on markets so thin that selling one day of mining rewards would crash the price you calculated with.
• The data itself is stale, and you are looking at yesterday's opportunity.

A raw profit column treats all of these the same as Bitcoin. The opportunity score does not.

The four ingredients

The score blends four signals into a single 0 to 100 number. They are not equally weighted, and each one can drag an otherwise attractive opportunity down.

Profit

The base signal: estimated net earnings for your hardware after electricity, relative to the other opportunities available to you. Better profit raises the score. This is the only ingredient most tables show you.

Risk

A penalty for instability. Coins with violent difficulty swings, erratic network hashrate, frequent reorgs or a history of profit spikes that evaporate within hours score worse. A steady 2 dollars a day is often a better opportunity than a 6 dollars a day estimate that exists because a network hiccupped 20 minutes ago.

Data confidence

A measure of how much the inputs deserve trust. Fresh data from multiple agreeing sources scores high. A price that comes from a single exchange, has not updated in hours, or disagrees sharply between sources scores low. When confidence drops, the score drops with it, because whatever the profit column says, we cannot vouch for it.

Liquidity

Profit you cannot sell is not profit. This signal looks at real market depth and 24 hour volume: whether you could actually convert a realistic amount of mined coins at something near the quoted price. Thin books and low-volume markets get penalized hard, because they are where paper profit goes to die.

Reading the score

There is no magic threshold, but in practice:

• 70 to 100: solid data, real markets, sane risk. The profit figure means what it says.
• 40 to 70: mineable, but check which ingredient is dragging. Often it is liquidity on a smaller coin, which matters more the more hashrate you point at it.
• 0 to 40: treat the profit column as fiction until proven otherwise. Something in the chain, freshness, source agreement, market depth or network stability, is broken.

The trap: high profit, low score

Sort any profitability table by raw profit and the top rows are frequently the worst trades available. That is not a coincidence. It is selection bias: errors and anomalies are what push an estimate to the top.

A realistic example. A low-cap coin shows 4 times the profit of everything else. Where does that number come from? One exchange, one thin order book, one price tick pushed up by a single buyer. The network difficulty then reacts to the profit-switching wave, the buyer is gone, and the miners who chased the number are left holding a coin they cannot sell at anything close to the price the calculator used.

The score exists to make that trap visible before you step in it. The profit was real arithmetic. The inputs were garbage. A 92 dollar per day estimate with a score of 18 is not an opportunity. It is a warning label.

What the score is not

Two honest limitations:

• It is not a prediction. The score describes the quality of the current opportunity, not what difficulty or price will do tomorrow. A high score means the estimate is trustworthy now, not that it will hold.
• It is not financial advice. It is a data quality and risk instrument. What you mine, hold or sell remains your decision.

Where to see it

The score appears across the mining calculator, coin pages and the v3 API, where each response also carries the underlying freshness metadata so you can apply your own judgment on top of ours.

Trust the numbers that earn it. That is the whole idea.