Zcash (ZEC) is a new crypto currency project that launches officially tomorrow on 28th of October and there is already huge user interest in it and a lot of hype. Since ZEC coins will be mined and the development of miners and pools is currently moving very fast thanks to the significant interest from users you might want to be ready and up to speed with what is happening. What a lot of people still may not be aware of is the fact that Zcash has implemented a slow-start mechanism for the first 20,000 blocks (or about 34 days), meaning that the block reward will start at 0 coins and gradually move to the 12.5 ZEC reward in the course of the first 20K blocks. It will take a bit more than 2 days for the block reward to reach 1 ZEC and before that with the expected huge amount of hashrate thrown at the network right from the start the initial rewards for miners will most likely be very small. The linear rate of block reward increase effectively creates half as many ZEC in the first 20,000 block period resulting in 125,000 ZEC mined instead of the normally expected 250,000 ZEC for the first month of mining.

Now, regarding mining, there are already a couple of mining pools available (mostly running on testnet) and a number of miners and more work is currently being done on improving miner performance and increasing compatibility. It seems that the NiceHash nheqminer is currently a popular choice, even though it currently supports only CPU mining and CUDA GPU mining with OpenCL support apparently expected shortly. The original miner from NiceHash is hardcoded to support only their mining pools, though since the source code is available other pools have adapter it to work with them as well (you need to get a dedicated version of the miner for that). Have in mind that mining Zcash on NiceHash might be more interesting option for some, but not for other users as you will be getting paid in BTC instead of ZEC… remember that you are essentially selling your mining hashrate and getting paid in BTC and not mining ZEC directly with them. There is also the alternative of purchasing Zcash Cloud Mining Hashrate from Genesis Mining…

Here is a list of pools where you can mine Zcash (ZEC) when the mining starts tomorrow October 28th and get paid in ZEC coins, note that besides each pool there is a link for the miner that supports it. Do note that the list of pools is probably not complete, so if you find a missing one please post it in the comments, so that it can be added in the list. Make sure that the pool is already operational and running on the testnet and clearly states what miner is supported in order for people to be able to test it…

– https://zec.suprnova.cc/ – CPU/CUDA miner
– https://www2.coinmine.pl/zec/ – CPU/CUDA miner
– http://coinsforall.io/ – OpenCL/CUDA miner
– http://zcash.flypool.org/ – CPU/CUDA miner
– https://zmine.io/ – CPU miner

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