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. So at normal electricity costs, a good setup up, and $55 per ZEC you can profit 2x your equipment costs. Find out if it's profitable to mine Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, DASH or Monero. After doing these calculations you will think that you are wasting time in mining ZEC and should buy them directly.

At the moment everyone is talking about the upcoming launch of Zcash (ZEC) crypto and there is a lot of hype and interest from users, miners, investors etc. It seems however that many people are still not aware of some of the specifics of Zcash, especially regarding the slow start that is being implemented. The launch of the mainnet of Zcash is planned for tomorrow - October 28th and that goes for mining as well and due to the serious interest the network hashrate of Zcash should be huge right from the start as everyone will be willing to get in early. That however may not be the best thing to do and let me tell you why. The specifications of Zcash state that the coins will be issued at 12.5 ZEC per block with a block time of 2.5 minutes and rewards will be halving each 4 years or about 840000 blocks.

This is pretty much consistent with what is happening with Bitcoin, though with BTC we have started at 50 BTC per block and 10 minutes target block time. With ZEC this translates to pretty much the same amount of coins for the same time period, but achieved with shorter block time and lower block reward, still every 10 minutes there should be 4 blocks totaling 50 ZEC. Because of the difference in specifications the first 4 years will result in 4 times more blocks than what Bitcoin had in the first four years - 840,000 instead of just 210,000. () Zcash however has implemented what they call a 'slow start' and that is the really important thing here for everyone that wants to jump in from the start and begin mining ZEC coins immediately.

The first 20,000 blocks that should take about 34 days the mining reward per block will be growing linearly from 0 to the full 12.5 ZEC coins aka the slow start. This specific is set so that people that did not get too early on will still have the chance to get on board before the difficulty skyrockets and it is really hard to mine, or so was the plan probably. With the huge interest and a lot of hype however I expect that people will jump in with a lot of hashrate right from day 1 and the network difficulty will indeed skyrocket and there could be a lot of disappointment from people that missed the read about the slow start. Another very important thing to consider about Zcash block rewards is the developer's share of all of the blocks that will be mined before the first halving occurs. Each PoW block is being divided 80% for the miners and 20% to the Zcash team until the first halving occurs when 100% of the mined coins will go to the miners.

This makes the regular block reward of 12.5 ZEC divided as 10 ZEC per miners and 2.5 ZEC for the Zcash team initially. When you take the slow start with linearly growing block reward this will make the actual block reward going to miners in the first days even smaller. The first two days and a couple of hours the block reward will barely reach 1 ZEC and with thousands of miners trying to get what little coins will be generated it will really be hard to mine much. There will be literally thousands of Hashes per second of hashrate from cloud mining contracts from Genesis Mining and miners that are leasing their hashrate though services such as NiceHash, not to mention everyone that will be moving their GPU mining rigs to try things out. Even CPU mining might still be a viable option for some, at least initially, though with the small initial block reward it is doubtful.

So don't worry that you might not be ready to mine Zcash yet, you will have some time while the block reward grows in the first days and the mined coins per day actually start making some sense. Because of that design of Zcash at launch and due to the big interest it is possible that the initial price of ZEC will be huge due to the scarcity of the mined coins at the start (that also depends on major crypto exchanges listing Zcash fast). So buying in ZEC early on might not be that good idea, though selling some with big profit and then buying back when things settle down later on might be an option (or directly renting your hashrate). There is no guarantee for that happening for sure though, so does not take this as an actual advice, just something to consider as likely to happen. • If you have a question or want to add something, then please leave a comment below.

Did you like what you have just read? I purchased a 10 H/s mining contract from Genesis Mining last night.

Highly speculative and risky venture, but I had some extra Bitcoin just sitting around and figured it will be an interesting experiment. Given the recent interest in Monero for similar privacy reasons, the high expectations for Zcash do not surprise me. And with its similar characteristics to Bitcoin regarding coin supply & mining rate, combined with relative scarcity at the start, I agree we can expect a high initial valuation which will probably decrease as sellers gradually bring their coins to the market. But the high price might remain propped up longer than we've seen with recent coin launches since everybody has to mine the supply first. I've heard that both Kraken and Poloniex will list ZEC from day 1. Which kind of surprises me given it's going to take a long time for any sort of decent depth to build up on the order books.

The first few lucky sellers will be able to command ridiculous prices, I'm sure. If you are mining Zcash, the sensible strategy is to sell as much as you can as fast as you can. And if you are not mining, the best thing to do is sit on your hands and wait for the price to stabilize. Don't buy up the initial thin order book no matter how tempting it may be. And I actually don't mind the slow mining start.

Genesis Mining added a free extra month to their contract to make up for that. And maybe it'll scary away some people after the first few days, leading to hash rate dropping off and a bigger share of the mining pot for dedicated miners in it for the long-term.

What do you mean by completely messing it up or destorying it? A huge spike in hashrate can lead to spike in difficulty, but this is not like destroying it, with the more recent difficulty adjustment algorithms used the difficulty is readjusted much more often (up to each block) than it was with Bitcoin and Litecoin for example. Zcash uses such algorithm for difficulty readjustment, though there will be a lot of hashrate right from the start anyway for sure. As for Steem mining, just take a look at the miner-witness queue at the moment, it has been dominated by two users for a long time and since they are using private GPU miners they are essentially killing the will of anybody else to mine. Fortunately mining does not play a big role in how Steem is secured, but who is to say that somebody with a lot of voting power on Steemit cannot decide to intervene in the top witness list.

With the interest Zcash is getting I highly doubt that any single miner will be able to pull off a 51% attack, that would mean a tremendous hashrate controlled by a single user. If there is such a user he would most likely be willing to mine and profit from it than using it maliciously. I'm actually yet to see a coin being destroyed by a 51% attack and double spending. Though some smaller have suffered from loses from such attacks. It is not like you can just point out your Bitcoin mining farm to mine Zcash, because ZEC uses new and different proof of work algorithm and you can only mine it with CPUs and GPUs. Renting all available hashrate from a service such as NiceHash will also not be enough for 51%. And before trying to double spend coins you need to actually have some, so you need to either buy or mine a significant amount first.

I've been interested in Zcash as well, but the same slow start and super hype has me concerned as well. I was tempted to start up a cloud mining account to try it out, but I feel a lot of people are going to be burned on this one either by spending a ton on mining or buying up coins too early before the price reaches some rational equilibrium. The lack of supply in the beginning may support the high initial price, but long term. I do think it would be nice to have some Zcash for the features it offers bitcoin currently does not, but I'd also want to know I could transact with it easily as well and right now bitcoin has a huge adoption lead on everything else.

I guess that a lot of people feel that they missed the Bitcoin train and just jump at every new promising opportunity they get, hoping that this time they will be right to get in from the start. Not a bad thing to do, though you should still carefully choose your battles. Zcash does look very promising, but jumping all in without even getting all the details first can be a problem and I'm getting the feeling that many people actually do that. I won't be surprised in seeing a lot of people tomorrow that will just rent enormous hashrate right from the start of the mining from NiceHash and then figure out the hard way about the initial very low rewards. I would stay away from the ZMBS. They have offered similar funds in the past which have not performed well. BnkToTheFuture has an agreement with Genesis Mining to use their mining farm for such services.

So you're really paying for the underlying Genesis Mining contracts, plus a management fee on top of that to BnkToTheFuture. So you'll get a better deal just purchasing a mining contract directly from Genesis Mining. BnkToTheFuture does offer some interesting and worthwhile investments, so it's a good platform to look at, but do stay away from anything that's described as a Mining Backed Security.

Hey everyone, I got some good feedback on my beginners guide check it out here if you don't already know how to use MSI afterburner, Nicehash Auto switching miner or how to calculate your electricity usage and profits on whattomine.com. If you are familar with all that then the following guide is aimed at squeezing that extra $1 per day out of each card and tweaking it for extra hashing power. Which cards can make you a profit on. Listed in order of profitably and resale value.

Note I only list very common cards other less common but powerful models are also good. GTX 1080ti GTX1070 GTX 1080 GTX 1060 RX570 RX480 - Will need to be retired in one or two months so if you have these SELL now as they will still get a high price.

Note that you are kind of ripping people off if you do sell high and they are unaware of the coming changes to mining ETH so please be aware. So you know how to mine with nicehash.exe and its giving you a steady profit. Most of the cards listed above will give you a very similar ROI (return on investment).

They will pay themselves off in 3-6 months depending on BTC price etc. Except the AMD cards are generally a bit slower on returns. The 1070 is ranked higher than the 1080 as they are very similar but the 1070 has the benefit of having some models that only take up one slot so if you want to fit more cards in a single case having one of these might be worth it. 1080 ti is ranked the highest for one reason. Once it is paid off it's all profit. You want to fit as many cards on one motherboard as you can and you may as well have the most powerful if they pay themselves off at the same rate.

That way you can fit more in your system without having to buy another CPU/MB/PSU etc. Where to buy.

New egg and amazon a great places to pick these cards up if you live in the US you get bonus points on amazon? And newegg has great deals and points too. I live in New Zealand so I have to suffer and just buy at my local computer store. Also buy new unless you can get the receipt for second hand as these cards have 3 year warranty. Which coin to mine and calculators For the purposes of this guide assume all hash rates (mining speed) is based on the 1080 ti.

As they are all relevant to their price per performance. For example the 1080 might cost 30% less but it also hashes at 30% less etc etc). Note the RX480 and RX570 probably are not as efficient based on their price as they are selling second hand for sometimes more than people paid for them. I would not be buying these cards anymore. 3.1 Advanced mining. So nicehash will automatically pick the most profitably coin to mine for you and mine it.

It will pick the best miner and algorithm also so all the hard work is done. But if you want to squeeze an extra $1 or sometimes 2$ per card there is better ways to do it. There is several popular command line miners. They can mine different coins and algorithms and some are better and some are not. Nicehash has tried to keep up but it is usually a little bit behind. To find profitable coins use this link.

By default it is set to 3x 280X at non tweaked settings but it gives you a good indication, 3x 280 is similar to 1x 1080ti but the 1080 ti uses less power. You can select your card but clicking on the name of the card and it will go red. You can configure your cards and how fast they go as well as how my electricity they use as your power cost. You can even put in your hardware costs to see how long it would take to pay off the card. Use whattomine as a guide. Take Zcash (zec) for example on a 1080 ti. It is a very stable and profitable coin to mine.

Most will use ccminer or some other miner to mine it. A typical hash rate would be 500 sol (same as hash mh/s). But if you get an advanced miner that targets this coin you can get a massive boost of upto say 720 sol. Usually these miners are free but sometimes the developer will take 1-2% of your earnings.

This is very very fair. They are generally taking 10cents a day off you and giving you an extra 1-2$ sometimes more depending on the rates. So from that picture you are making $5.54 USD a day and spending around $1.25 a day on power, that is $4.27 a day profit. As the price of BTC goes up or you can hold your mining earnings and sell when its up the better the price is. Zec and everything is about to take a massive dive so by the time you read this guide the prices might have gone up or down.

Those prices will rebound and it is the risk we take. But you can move onto other coins etc.

Once you have found a coin you like click the coins section on whattomine.com and input your values for it and this will give you a more accurate reading. How to mine with advanced miners Nicehash.exe is so simple that this is where it could get confusing. So you have picked your coin or algorithm (algorithms sometimes mine multiple coins switching between which one is more profitable).

Now you need a miner. Note not all miner programs work with both Nvidia/AMD most of the recent ones tend to optimize Nvidia over AMD or don't support AMD at all.

A - For zcash (ZEC) you will want to use EWBF's CUDA Zcash miner v0.3.4b. () or version 0.3.3b is also fine. This miner will give you around 30% boost of most other zcash miners. Nicehash now has this built into is latest version. B - Download the file and extract this to your desired folder for example 'C: mining EWBF'.

Now find the start.bat right click and select EDIT. It is an example of the basic commands to use to start mining. I will give you an example so don't worry. C - Make sure you have a BTC wallet where you want to send your BTC as this guide is showing you how to mine ZEC but auto convert it to BTC as this is generally best practice. If you want to actually keep the coin you are mining that is more complicated and I will not be showing it here but you can easily google for the solution. You can use an exchange or you can use your own personal wallet or you can use Nicehash wallet. Personally I use nicehash wallet as there is a 3% fee to use external wallet and a 2.3% fee if you use nicehash.

Also if you go external and you have only one card the minimum payout usually takes a week. If you use the nicehash wallet you can get paid out every day or every second day. D - Select your mining pool.

You can solo mine or pool mine. Think of it like a real gold mine. You are trying to find blocks or in this case gold. If you are by yourself in a big gold mine you could go for months and find nothing or strike gold if you were super lucky. If you go as a group and share all the profits regardless of who finds what that is what a mining pool is.

You can earn bonuses but you generally don't need too worry about that. Always use a mining pool. Solo mining is for people with lots of cards and advanced knowledge. I generally use nicehash pool because of the auto convert to BTC.

But you can use any pool you want but remember they have different fees and reliability. - This is a list of all the different algorithms and pools for the different miners. We will be using equihash.usa.nicehash.com because zec uses Equihash to mine. Choose a different one based on your location for better reliability. Nicehash.com also has lists of other pools you can use too. Other useful pools are as follows.

Www.nanopool.com you can set lower limits on the payouts to get paid sooner but it does not auto convert to BTC so you must have a wallet per coin. Nanopool has a great wizard for mining setup.

Just select the coin you want to mine and it will tell you what to download and create the bat files for you and you are good to go. But it is not always the most optimised so you may as well just use nicehash.exe. Zpool.ca Auto converts to BTC or whatever coin you want and has lower fees but occasionally gets DDos attacked resulting in brief connectivity loss. E - edit the command file or.bat file.

Right click start.bat and select edit. Here is mine for example with my Wallet address. Miner --server equihash.usa.nicehash.com --user 3Dz5TNYhKHf19XJBXkjGY6fdYALpEwVkUy.Ryzen --pass x --port 3357 --pec Replace with your wallet key and where it says 'Ryzen' just put the name of your miner in there.

Everything else can be left as is. F - Configuration. This is the most important step. Most cards their sweet spot is around 65-75% reduced TPD or reduced power.

Open MSI afterburner that you already know how to use from my last guide. You will be custom setting the settings per miner. Where as with Nicehash.exe you set it to settings that work good for most miners. Set pretty much exactly like this.

75% TPD is a sweet spot, you would only set it higher if the price of zcash went up alot. Zcash likes higher clock speeds 1080ti can go from +50 to +200 for the clock speeds. +50 is safe on almost all models. Already overclocked models dont like to go much over +100. Stock models can sometimes go upto +200. Google your card to find what others have set it to. If you set it and start mining and your PC freezes you set it too high.

Zcash mining doesn't really get any benefit from overclocking the memory so just leave it at zero. Some claim that you can set it to -502 and it doesn't change the hash rate.

For zcash I find +0 is better and the negative setting is not really doing anything it might stress the memory less. Try it yourself. Make sure your temp is under 60-70 adjust the fan accordingly. Some algorithms such as Skein do run the same at -502 as setting it to zero so it doesn't hurt. Please stick to default settings other than TPD 75% when you first start the miner so you know you are stable then try to tweak the settings up slowly. Note on bat files.

You can save individual bat files for each different miner. Or if you use the same miner but sometimes use a different pool create a new bat file for that configuration.

Another thing I do is write down the MSI tweak settings for each card inside that bat file so you dont forget what works well for each card/coin. Extra requirements that most miners need if you have a Nvidia card. (install in this order) • Nvidia cuda latest version • Latest drivers for GPU • Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable 6. The fun part.

Double click the start.bat to start mining. Monitor your temp and adjust the fan speed to compensate. You can see I have two cards in this rig. It is my gaming computer and I have not optimized it so you can see the Hash rate or SOL is not high but it is not terrible either. Also it can take a while to ramp up. Aim for around 4 Sol/W by lowering or upping the TPD and tweaking the core clock.

Mine is set to +0 in this test. Depending on what pool you use you can see your stats in near real time to make sure it is working. Finding info I would recommend these forums for finding stuff to mine and effeciency etc. Find what you want to mine. Get the miner, choose a pool. Tweak and configure. Find out your hash rate and put it in a calculator to make sure it is making more profit than Nicehash.exe.

I personally mostly mine Zec and some other ones like HUSH or occasionally a coin will spike so high you will target it. You can google search to find out which miner you need or which is the best and how to configure the bat file. I recommend starting out just using nicehash pool because it is simple and auto converts to BTC. Autoconvert to BTC is the best way.

Most coins follow the price of BTC. So mine what is profitable at the time and buy whatever coins you want with it. A QUICK WARNING Just a note guys prices are the lowest I have every seen for mining returns. But they are still profitable. If you have a gaming computer may as well do it. Just hold your BTC and sell it later at a higher price. Things are going to be rough over the next month or so as most coins will drop because of the BTC 1st AUG announcement.

My next blog I will go over using the exchange and converting back to real $$$ if this blog proves popular enough for me to write another one. I am sorry if there is a lot of information but it is hard to skip over anything. I will also be covering multiple GPU's in a single rig. Up to four or five in one. Build in progress this rig is currently running 2x 1080 ti outside of the case.

Waiting for parts to connect two more cards. I used to mine bitcoin, litecoin, and ethereum using AMD 7950's, 6950's and 5850's across multiple desktops with about 2-3 cards inside each. Just wanted to say watch out for the electricity bill because they are in tiers.

If you go over a certain level, they start charging like crazy. +1 to Nanopool that's what I used for ETH.

Lastly, a lot of people say just buy the coin and don't waste on mining. I disagree to an extent.

It's a good idea if you like to game and it's an investment that gets paid back eventually while being able to play whatever games your into. +The video cards still have great resale value because of the mining demand.

WIll give the step by step that I am using: (Not saying that you guys should do this) 1- buy an L3 machine on hashnest.com for $ 3600 2- Wait the L3 stock run out (usually takes 5 days to the stock run out) 3 - After the stock runs out.let it mine litecoin for 10 days 4- After 10 days the price of the hashpower on the market doubles.then u just sell the L3 that you purchase for 3600 for 7200. (You will have 100% profit + the 10 days mining litecoin) 5 - Wait the stock of L3 to be available again and this time you will purchase 2 L3 and do the same procedure. 6- repeat the process Check it out. Don't also forget Ethereum Classic. They will keep rewarding miners forever, not switching to PoS Casper algo. Helping to prolong the profitability of AMD Rx 470/480 if the community and idea stay strong.

They got some cool projects going on, some really cool ICO's that don't feel as 'scammy' as many of the ETH ones. I am not biased towards any of the coins, i have mined both and am invested in both, just wanted to make that as a note.

I think many miners will go to ETC, right know it is almost as profitable to mine ETC as ETH, and as miners work towards ROI, we will see what happens in the future. But i think many of the AMD cards will be switched to ETC when Casper hits. Great post, great that you are helping people get it going! Peace and Steem on friends.:). Be sure to check out my latest guide number #3 it shows you how to get a rig all setup and what you need to be able to build a 4 or 5 GPU rig.

Guide #4 will be all about building the rig and what you need and what to watch out for. I should have it ready in 3-5 days. You are right to wait. Until after 1st AUG see how fast the prices bounce back. If they bounce back fast you are good to go and profits will be good. But you can get in now and pay off your gear sooner rather than later as you can hold any profits you mine now and they will be worth more thwn it recovers. Very nicely detailed post.

A couple suggestions by me: • I use Jaxx as my wallet and can store ZCash directly there - no need to auto convert first. Jaxx stores multiple currencies and is worth a look. • Suprnova is a pretty decent pool for most coins. I've been really happy with their interface and quick payouts, as well as the convenience of having one universal login across all of their domains. • Save a bat file for each different coin you mine.

Once set up and it's stable, you no longer have to edit the command line config every time. So for EWBF's miner, I have batch files such as Start-Zcash.bat, Start-Zen.bat, Start-Hush.bat and so on.

• Get solar power! This is nowhere as simple as the previous three tips of course, but hey. My house has a few panels on the roof bringing in more than we spend on electricity every month. I'm able to run a rig of 7 GTX 1070s at zero electricity cost as a result, and this seriously adds up over time.

You're still, like the article says, able to be profitable even with high elec costs at the moment, but if you're keen to get mining then look into solar as a long term investment (plus, mining aside, it's just so much better for the planet!). • The point is you don't want to store the coin. I mean you can if you want. But I firmly believe in auto converting to BTC as the best option when mining. It is the safest way to protect your profits.

If you then want to turn around and invest in certain coins you can pick your moment and buy when the buying is good. I do use Jaxx wallet but generally not for storing coin. • Suprnova is decent but has had issues I prefer nanopool but either would be fine. • Good advice.

This is what I do too I will add a line to my blog as I figured most people would just do it that way without being told. • Solar would be amazing.

I just don't have 20k to drop on it right now:D. I would use teamviewer it acts more like you are actually on the PC rather than making a remote session, you can name your rigs. Also there is lots of tweaks you can do to disable updates etc. I will do a blog on tweaks. I have a bat file you can run and it does all that stuff in a few minutes automatically. You can set the overclock and power tweaks in the miner batch files instead of MSI afterburner. Personally it is a bit of work so I just have the values in the batch file but I manually configure them in MSI afterburner and save the profile.

Mining on your own basically you get all the profit. Only 2-3% is given to the mining pool and other people. Depending on the price of BTC your power can cost 5-15% of your profits. So that 2% margin the mining power. They onsell that 2% margin to suckers. They will likely allow you to make 2% margin if you are lucky. Syscoin SYS Mining 2018 there. That is if the price doesn't drop and stays the say.

The only way you can make money from mining contracts is if the price of the coin you are mining goes up, so you may as well have bought the coin outright with your money in the firse place because you would not be locked into any fixed contracts or referal schemes or monthly fees. Just buy the coin and you are free to do with it whatever you want when you want.

They are a ponzi scheme at best. Half the time you spend trying to sucker in other people just to make ends meet. 2 years is crazy in mining. 1 year is crazy.

I plan to sell up all my cards every 6 months and buy the latest ones, only as long as mining is still worth it. In 3-6 months things might have changed and GPU mining is worthless.

As long as you have a plan in place for every 3-6 months you are pretty well protected. You can sell all your gear every six months and not really lose too much on the price. There is legitimate uses for mining contracts such as a company that may use the hashing power for something other than mining or they need to mine something specific for a short period of time and don't then won't need the hardware afterwards. Contracts are generally scams or very risky returns.

If you made money it's because the coin went up and you got lucky. Could have made more putting your investment in the coin immediatly. It is true to some extent. It checks every 6 minutes i think.

And most of the time that is true. But nicehash doesn't support every single miner and algorithm. There is custom algorithms that mine certain coins faster. Most of the top 5 coins to mine in nicehash will only be 20-30 cents difference all day long. Now if you get a custom miner that is 30% more efficient on a single coin it is going to beat nicehash all day long. For example I was mining ZEC on EWBF 0.3.3.b for around 3 months before it was included in nicehash.

You can see details on how to manuually mine it in my guide #2. But it is now included in nicehash.

I currently do not know of any that are that good out there right now so nicehash is good. But it doesn't mine every coin and algo still so you can find some coins that are more profitable. Generally they are hard to find and the profits run out once they become popular to mine.