Archive for the ‘General Info’ Category

Mining Profitability of Zcash (ZEC) and Ethereum (ETH) Is Now Pretty Much the Same

7, Nov 2016

zcash-calculator

After the initial craze due to the scarcity of Zcash (ZEC) coins and the big demand the prices has skyrocketed, but now with the slow start of mining progressing and the total block reward almost at 4 ZEC things are starting to stabilize. The initial crazy high profit for mining and selling Zcash coins seems to be over and at the moment mining and selling ETH or ZEC does bring almost the same profit for some GPU miners, though not for all. Miners with older AMD Radeon 79×0 and 280X GPUs still have higher profit mining Zcash than Ethereum, but for users with RX 480 for example things are already on the line to switch back to Ethereum. Nvidia seems to be currently lagging as far as performance optimizations for Zcash go, so the profitability there could be better for another algorithm or mining for another perspective in the long term crypto coin might also be a viable option.

You can keep track of the current profitability with the help of some useful mining calculators like the ones provided by CryptoCompare for both Zcash (ZEC) as well as for Ethereum (ETH) along with a few other popular coins such as Ethereum Classic (ETC), Monero (XMR), DigitalCash (DASH) and Litecoin (LTC). Make sure you set the correct hashrate your mining hardware is providing for each algorithm to make a proper calculation as different GPUs do provide different hashrate for the various algorithms. Do note that Etheeum Classic might also turn out to be pretty profitable alternative as well for some video cards that are still providing higher hashrate for the Ethash algorithm.

Zcash (ZEC) is Now Slowly Stabilizing After a Bumpy Start

30, Oct 2016

zchain

Zcash (ZEC) had a good start, but there were trouble with different pools and miners, even though everyone was willing to mine due to the overblown initial price of ZEC coins and their scarcity on the market. Now things are already starting to stabilize with prices going down to a more reasonable level, pools having less trouble and more miners to choose from. The slow start implemented for the launch of Zcash is working as expected with the block reward just a bit short from 1 ZEC at the moment and a network difficulty of 2,585,881 Sol/s with just about 751 ZEC coins mined so far (20% of them in the hands of developers).

Just as we have expected and predicted the big interest and a lot of hype have materialized in high demand and big initial price and while the price is still pretty high it will continue to go down as the block reward increases and more ZEC coins become available on the market. So if you are mining ZEC at the moment it might be wise to sell them now and later on buy more at a cheaper price with the money you have made from mining at the moment… seems like the most reasonable thing to do, otherwise the hard mined coins now will be worth even less in a couple of days.

The positive effect from the big move of mining hashrate to mine Zcash is that some other coins have become more interesting to mine if you are mining and holding on the long run than instead of mining and selling immediately for profit like you might be doing with ZEC. So now that the profit is not as big as at the initial launch you might also look around for alternatives and see if they might have become more interesting to mine than they were before the Zcash launch.

– To keep a track of how things are moving with the Zcash using the Zchain explorer…

Getting Ready for the Zcash (ZEC) Official Launch Tomorrow

27, Oct 2016

zcash-block-reward

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.

zcash-nicehash

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…

nheqminer-nicehash

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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