Tips on Where to Mine Zcash (ZEC) and What Miners to Use
Zcash (ZEC) has launched officially a bit earlier today and things have literally gone crazy, just as expected with all the user interest before the launch and all the hype surrounding the new altcoin. Mining has started as well, though it is apparently still a bit of a problem for people where to mine and what miner to use, so I figured out that I can share some experience and tips based on my experience so far. Hopefully this will help you get started mining properly, but don't forget that Zcash (ZEC) has implemented a slow start and currently the block reward is still pretty small. The block reward will need 34 days to linearly reach the regular level of 12.5 ZEC, so the first day just about 100 ZEC coins will be mined in total. Speculations and really high prices for selling very small amounts of ZEC are already on the exchanges that listed the coin already such as Poloniex and Kraken. I have already written more details about the slow start and the block rewards here - Ready to Mine Zcash (ZEC), But Are You Aware of the Initial Block Rewards
Where to mine with CPU and Nvidia CUDA GPUs
The best place to mine Zcash with CPU or Nvidia CUDA GPUs at the moment seems to be Flypool, a stratum mining pool that supports a number of stratum-enabled miners for the Equihash algorithm used by Zcash (ZEC). The pool seems to be the best place for CPU and Nvidia miners for the moment, the pool lists Genoil's OpenCL miner as supported as well, but that particular miner is still quite problematic to run and I'm having issues making it work as well, so you might not want to bother with it for the moment. The pool currently has a zero mining fee.
Where to mine with AMD OpenCL GPUs
The best place for the moment with a properly working OpenCL miner for most people seems to be the Coinsforall mining pool that has a working OpenCL/CUDA miner available. This pool does not use stratum and their own miner is currently not compatible with other pools as they are pretty much all using the stratum protocol. Do note that currently this pool has a pretty high mining fee of 4%, though it is the only viable option for OpenCL mining, so not much of a choice.
Alternatively you can also try selling your hashrate on NiceHash, the rate is pretty high at the moment, though it can vary a lot and the profit might not be as big as directly mining and selling when you get at least 0.01 ZEC available to withdraw from the pool and sell it on an exchange. Mining directly to an exchange address can be helpful if you want to mine and sell directly in order to get high profit with the initial scarcity of Zcash coins and the big demand for them that is currently present.
If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.
Did you like what you have just read? Check my other posts on steemit @cryptos
If you like what I'm doing for Steem and on Steemit you can support me as a Witness
Nice info here. I wish I could try it myself, but my hardware is too old & crappy for mining. I'll just have to be happy with my Genesis Mining contract and hope it pays out enough to sell a bit while the price is still at insane levels. At this rate, if it drops all the way down to 1 BTC people will be considering it "cheap". Literally couldn't believe my eyes when I woke up today and checked Poloniex.
I kind of expected this to happen initially, though the price should normalize in time... there are currently only about 150 ZEC mined, so the coin is really hard to obtain at the moment and a lot of people want to get some and the price gets really crazy. In a couple of days the price should be at a more reasonable levels, but for the moment mining even a little and selling it can net you really nice profit.
I was expecting a high initial valuation too, but this completely exceeded my wildest imaginings. By "high valuation" I was figuring maybe 1.5 or 2 BTC... I kind of feel sorry for whoever is getting suckered into buying at the current prices.
People just went crazy over this one... I was also not expecting so high prices initially :)
If you are using older AMD drivers such as 15.12 on older Radeon cards you might want to take some time to update to a more recent release do the drivers as it should boost your mining hashrate. Newer AMD GPUs such as the Radeon RX 4x0 series should already be using a more recent driver version, so the should be no significant difference in hashrate...
There is a new Stratum-enabled miner with CPU, CUDA and OpenCL support available now for the https://zec.suprnova.cc/ mining pool that ups the performance a bit on Nvidia GPUs, but is slower on AMD than the Flypool miner : https://github.com/ocminer/nheqminer/releases
Block explorer for Zcash to keep track of what is going on with the network: https://explorer.zcha.in/
This post has been linked to from another place on Steem.
Learn more about and upvote to support linkback bot v0.5. Flag this comment if you don't want the bot to continue posting linkbacks for your posts.
Built by @ontofractal
New OpenCL miner from Genoil is available now, this one seems to work much better than the earlier releases and offers good performance, though it sill has issues on Radeon 280x apparently... https://github.com/Genoil/ZECMiner/tree/master/releases
Nice blog. Same mindset here. Cryptos are currently high risk. But the market will find it's way and blockchain is here to stay. I really advice people to take a look at: https://www.coincheckup.com This site is really helpful in my coin research. I don't know any other sites with so much indepth analysis. See: https://www.coincheckup.com/coins/Zcash#analysis To check Zcash Detailed report