With all the crypto currency saga about to hit the 10K USD gold rush, perhaps its a good idea to look into layman's options to mine.

My personal favorite is CURE coin, but will describe mining in a different post.

(screenshot of Cryptocompare.com )

Zcash - the Equihash based privacy oriented Zcash is an attempt to defeat ASIC based mining and thus decentralize crypto again.

Equihash algorithm is designed to limit ASIC optimizations. Solo mining is impractical just like any other miner and pool mining using slushpool, nicehash pool etc is an option that we can attempt. Most of the pool miners for zcash is based on nicehash's pool miners.

setting up miner of Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 in this case)

The instruction should work on most of the Ubuntu version and Debian based distributions.

• this is to create a directory to keep the code

sudo mkdir /home/zcash
cd /home/zcash

• install the necessary build support packages

sudo apt-get install cmake build-essential libboost-all-dev

• compiling for the specific CPU architecture is important as that will improve the performance
• get the code from Github

git clone -b Linux https://github.com/nicehash/nheqminer.git

• we will have to assemble.sh to get the necessary CPU support

cd /home/zcash/nheqminer/cpu_xenoncat/Linux/asm/

sh assemble.sh
cd /home/zcash/nheqminer/Linux_cmake/nheqminer_cpu

cmake . && make

• this will give us the executable nheqminer_cpu
• copy the file to a common location in the PATH

cp nheqminer_cpu /usr/local/bin

You are all setto start mining & the following command will start mining using 8 threads

nheqminer_cpu -t 8 -l zec.slushpool.com:4444 -u greyfoot.init1z

on MacOS X & windows also mining is possible. For Windows, using the nicehash miner will be the method as that will be really fast. For the experiment I am running, the hash rate is around 40. Check the image below: