Monero Presents and Enticing Opportunity for GPU Miners

Mainstream news networks began to publicize articles on Monero August 22nd, followed shortly by a spike in price.

Many are aware of the recent news concerning Monero (XMR) and the corresponding price explosion. Read about that here.

At current rates, mining XMR is becoming roughly equivalent or somewhat superior in output to Ethereum, which has remained one of the most popular GPU mining coins since the end of 2015.

Source: monero.net

We see here in the 1 month network hashrate vs. price chart a small yet noticeable increase in network hashrate corresponding to the price rally. It is still early, however it appears that GPU miners are finding it profitable, or are switching over to Monero to take advantage of the current mining difficulty which is undoubtedly on its way higher. Based Ethereum's rapid increase in hashrate since January, which in a matter of months made it very difficult for individual mining setups to compete, the time to take advantage of this is now. CPU mining this coin has long since been unprofitable, so the primary way of mining is with GPUs.

Available GPU Miners:

1. Claymore CrpytoNote Miner
   1. Proprietary miner, 2.5% fee directly to developer
   2. Catalyst 15.12 version was updated for Windows Sep 1st, no update for Linux available at this time. Last Linux version for Catalyst 14.6 may not work with current pools
   3. Will mine without special configuration
2. Wolf OpenCL XMR Miner
   1. Open Source, no fee
   2. No binaries, scarce documentation, must compile from source
   3. Manual configuration required of mining parameters

Evidently, the Claymore miner is much more popular due to its ease of deployment, it also is reported to have better hash rates by the order of about 200H/s over Wolf's. Noting Claymore's 2.5% fee, this may not be that substantial. The few technical barriers present in the Wolf's miner, may be holding up Linux miners from diversifying into this coin, however this may simply extend the entry opportunity for those miners considering Monero.

Monero fundamentals are there to sustain this coin for some time to come and while it may be a complex decision getting into GPU mining at this point in time, those already in the game should look at throwing some hashes at Monero.