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Zcash (ZEC) is a new decentralized and open-source crypto currency that is being advertised as an anonymous solution that offers privacy and selective transparency of transactions. Zcash payments are still going to be published on a public blockchain like other crypto coins, but the sender, recipient, and amount of a transaction will remain private. Zcash relies on zero-knowledge proofs in order to guarantee the validity of transactions on the network, but without actually having to reveal any additional information about them. This makes it possible to conceal values and other identifying information from the public blockchain and users simply prove that the values balance out and that they are not double-spending the amount they want to send.
Zcash is currently in beta and running on a testnet only, the official launch and genesis block on the mainnet is scheduled for October 28th or in about 21 days from now. This is when the first Zcash monetary units will come into existence, based on securely generated zkSNARK parameters, and when the mining of Zcash will actually launch. Currently Zcash is running a contest for an open-source Zcash miner until October 27th (the day before the official launch) a prize fund of $30,000 for the winner(s) of the challenge. Do note that the winning CPU miner entry will receive a $10,000 prize, the winning GPU miner entry will receive a $10,000 prize and the other $10,000 of prizes will be distributed to the Runners Up.
Zcash is using the so called Equihash algorithm for the production of new coins. Initially the Zcash interface will be a command-line tool on Linux, and will not include a graphical user interface, nor run on Windows or Mac OS at launch time. Zcash’s monetary base will be the same as Bitcoin’s – 21 million Zcash currency units (ZEC) will be mined over time. 10% of that reward will be distributed to the stakeholders in the Zcash Company — founders, investors, employees, and advisors, this is the so called “Founders Reward”. At first, 50 ZEC will be created every ten minutes and 80% of the newly created ZEC will go to the miners, and 20% ZEC to the founders. Every four years, the rate of ZEC being created will halve. After the first four years the ZEC created per ten minutes will drop to 25 ZEC, but after the first four years, 100% of it goes to the miners. The end result is that there will ultimately be 21 million Zcash, and 10% of it, or 2.1 million ZEC, will have been initially distributed to the founders. With this approach, the founders are incentivized to support Zcash for the long haul (at least for four years), and they have limited ability to pump-and-dump.
Since initial public mining for Zcash (ZEC) will most likely be limited to CPU mining on Lunux only, there is already an interesting alternative available from Genesis Mining as they have started taking pre-orders for cloud mining of Zcash. The company is offering three different basic cloud mining plans that are with a 1 year term and no additional maintenance fees applied, so the price you pay for the hashrate is the final one. Currently you can get 0.1 H/s for $29 USD, 1 H/s for $280 USD and 10 H/s for $2600 USD. Do note that these are pre-order prices and there is no guarantee what will happen with Zcash once it launches even with the already big interest in it from users. You can also use our special discount code during checkout to get 3% off the regular prices for Zcash mining hashrate, just enter CryptoMiningBlog5 as promo code during checkout to take advantage of the lower price.
– For more information about the Zcash cloud mining pre-order from Genesis Mining…
- In: Cloud Mining|Crypto Coins
- Tags: Equihash, Equihash miner, Equihash mining, Genesis Mining, Genesis Mining Zcash, Genesis Mining ZEC, Zcash, Zcash cloud mining, Zcash CPU miner, Zcash crypto, Zcash details, Zcash GPU miner, Zcash miner, Zcash mining, Zcash specifications, ZEC, ZEC cloud mining, ZEC CPU miner, ZEC crypto, ZEC details, ZEC GPU miner, ZEC miner, ZEC mining, ZEC specifications
Awesome Miner allows you to monitor and manage multiple mining rigs that can be mining different crypto coins, there is even an automatic profitability switching functionality built in. The software supports multiple mining engines: cgminer, bfgminer, sgminer, ccMiner, CpuMiner-Opt and Claymore’s Dual Ethereum Miner. There is also support for all popular mining algorithms can be used: SHA-256, SHA-3, Scrypt, Scrypt Adaptive N, X11, X13, X15, Nist5, Groestl, NeoScrypt, Lyra2RE, Lyra2REv2, Qubit, Quark, WhirlpoolX, Blake 2b, LBRY, Decred and Ethereum. The main purpose of the Awesome Miner software is to make mining easier to manage with some useful features for both small home miners as well as large scale mining operations. The software can manage up to 5000 miners from a single user interface.
The new version 2.0 of the software improves management of larger mining operations and adds more options for integration with external applications. The new security features make management possible in multi-user environments and the new API and scripting features makes integration and further customization possible. Do note that the majority of the functionality provided by the software is available in the completely Free version, including support for the Awesome Profit Switching functionality. The Free version of the software however is intended for small scale mining and comes with support for a maximum of 2 mining computers or ASIC’s. The Paid versions of the software include some more advanced features and come with support for very large mining operations.
– For more details about the Awesome Miner Management and Monitoring Software…
Recently there has been new somewhat positive development that may bring some miner back to mining HODL or at least trying to as the 1 year waiting time for the coins to be released is still there. Anyway, there is a new further optimized HODLminer forked by optiminer from Wolf’s code that does provide significant performance improvement (source). Below you can find a 64-bit Windows binary of the miner that you can use to mine HODL on your CPU, do note however that you still need to have a more recent AMD or Intel processor with AES-NI support in order to use the miner. You should also be able to use the slower non-AES-NI capable miner that you can find here for older CPUs without the required instruction support. Do note that you should be able to use this miner for other coins that rely on the HODL algorithm as there are apparently some already available such as ERC.
Performance for Intel Core i5820K CPU:
– Old Wolf HOLD miner: 250 H/s
– Optimized Optiminer fork: 560 H/s
The new miner however would be useless without a dedicated mining pool (it does not work with solo mining using the HODL wallet), so the same author also launched Optiminer HOdlcoin Mining Pool where you can point the miner to mine HODL for you. It is a PPLNS pool with 1.0% fee and requires 25 confirmations until a pending block counts as mined. Do note that all HODL coins are still locked for one year after mining as there is currently no way to withdraw the balance for miners. Instead, once the balance reaches at least 50 HODL, it gets eligible for including in a mining block. The next block will always be mined to the address of the miner which has the highest eligible balance at which point you would still have to wait for 1 year to actually be able to use these mined coins.
– To download and try the new optimized HODLminer and the new mining pool…