Posts Tagged ‘ZEC specifications

zcash-nicehash

Here is a quick list of the latest CPU and GPU miners available for mining the Zcash (ZEC) that uses the Equihash algorithm used by the coin. Since most pools and miners are based on Stratum mining support you should be able to use them on almost all mining pools with support for ZEC. What you should be looking for is what works best on your hardware in terms of stability and what provides you with the optimal hashrate in order for you to maximize your profit. CPU mining is still viable as GPU miners are yet to be further optimized to be able to provide significantly higher hashrates, though you should know that the days of the CPU mining of ZEC are probably numbered.

Because of the slow start mining that Zcash has implemented the block reward is still growing, so even with price going down and the total network hashrate going up the overall profit for mining and selling Zcash remains pretty stable and most importantly pretty high compared to other crypto coins at the moment. Because of that it is a wise decision to mine and sell Zcash at the moment until the end of the slow start of mining when the block reward will stabilize at the maximum level of 12.5 ZEC and that should provide a more stable price per coin than at the moment. Mining ZEC coins now and keeping the coins may result in them loosing significant value at least in short term, though in long term it might still be a viable option, so consider what to do carefully.

Best CPU miners for Zcash:
NiceHash’s nheqminer v0.3a (also supports CUDA and OpenCL)*

Best AMD OpenCL miners for Zcash:
ZECMiner v0.6 by Genoil

Best Nvidia CUDA miners for Zcash:
NiceHash’s nheqminer v0.3a (also supports CPU and OpenCL)*

* The nheqminer is available with hardcoded pools from nicehash, suprnova and other mining pools supporting Zcash, so make sure you download the correct version for the pool you are going to be mining at.

Genoil’s latest ZECMiner is pretty much the fastest public OpenCL miner (Windows binaries only) for Zcash at the moment, though there are some stability issues with cards dropping to 0 Sol/s and the miner crashing. The situation improves with each new version, but the miner is still not that good stability wise. The latest Nheqminer supports OpenCL mining, but is slower than ZECMiner, even though stability wise it is better… it is much better for CPU and CUDA mining though. Hopefully soon there will be other faster GPU miners that will offer more stability and features along the improved mining speeds, but for now you will need to do with what is currently available.

flypool-zcash-nvidia-cpu

Earlier today Zcash (ZEC) went live as expected and people are already starting to mine it, some of them probably are still not aware of the slow start with very small block rewards initially. Regardless, with what is available as miners at the moment there are pretty much two places where you would want to go for mining if you still haven’t done so. The first one for CPU mining and CUDA mining is Flypool that uses a modified version of NiceHash’s stratum miner available for download here CPU/CUDA miner for Flypool.

coinsforall-amd

For AMD mining you might want to head on to the Coinsforall mining pool that uses its own different protocol and has an OpenCL and CUDA miner. Earlier today Genoil has posted an OpenCL miner binary for Windows with stratum support, however it seems that his miner is still not ready for major use as most people are reporting issues making it work properly. We have tried his miner and also had trouble making it work properly, so if you have AMD OpenCL GPUs just go for Coinsforall for the moment and use their miner.

Exchanges where to trade ZCash (ZEC):
Binance
Bittrex
GATEio
Kraken
HitBTC
Yobit
Livecoin
Citex
Stex
Crex
Graviex

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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