How to mine Zcash

i honestly have no idea how to mine any cryptocurrency and i also dont own any miners. BUT i would be very very interrested if there was some kind of noob to geek lessons about mining for people like me.

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I wouldn’t jump into Zcash right now for mining purposes. Right now we just have a testnet which means everything gets reset later. We’re working with play money right now until we’ve completed 1.0, which should be around Q3.

i dont mind working on play money, all i want to know is how to mine cryptocurrency. i am a total noob to that. i can understand a few things but not the technical parts :confused:

If you’re familiar with Bitcoin mining, you can just run zcashd with -gen to start mining. If you’re not familiar with mining any cryptocurrency, I’m not sure where you should start, but Zcash may be too much of an uphill climb for most cryptocurrency noobs right now.

Thank you for taking an interest in it though!

Add gen=1 to the bitcoin.conf file to start mining

thank you for your reply and your time. i will try look further into it to grab a few more info. i love the forum design. very innovative

When will Q3 be? Near Future?

Q3 means the third quarter of the year, i.e. July to September 2016.

Ok thanks! Sure wish there was something as good as Zcoin to work with before then…

I am very interested in the cash project and am trying to learn as much as I can. I have installed Debian 8.3 as a Parallels VM on my MacBookPro. I have zcashd up and running. I set gen=1 in the bitcoin.conf file to enable mining. I understand that this is simply an exercise since the coins have no value at this time. I am wondering how do I know when a coin has been successfully mined ? Thanks in advance for your replies

Easiest way: check the balance of your wallet, the coinbase (the address your mining reward goes to) should have a higher value than before when you mined a block.

Hello - I have been running the zcash daemon, with gen=1 set, for about 24 hours now. Recently when I execute ./src/zcash-cli getinfo I began seeing this error:

“errors” : “WARNING: abnormally high number of blocks generated, 394 blocks received in the last 4 hours (24 expected)”

I don’t know if important but I thought i would pass it along…

That warning is displayed because mining is not difficult at all, so blocks are discovered extremely fast on the testnet.

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Do I understand correctly that mining will be based on SHA-256, the same as Bitcoin?

Bitcoin mining is currently considered as very-easy (with S7 but expensive stuffs and electricity), I dont know about IT and computer stuffs,… I am just wondering if the tools and program are easier than going in/out linux script with high specs VGA or things,… it will make zcash popularity skyrocket (I am an offshore engineer but I am a fans of cryptocurrency).

Please make it very very very simple,… probably you are all willing to consider Not-an-IT-guys to be involved in early period

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I would like this info as well, looking into asic units and need to know which ones I’m going to be looking at.

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Are there any details on what cards when it does go live are going to be used for hashing, are they going to be essentially bitmining cards?.

Hey, thanks for not telling us what algorithm you’re using to mine.

Pretty sure this should be on the first page of your website.

Are you going to keep this from us until Zcash is released so you can hoard even more of the block reward?

Obviously not all of us are ‘cryptocurrency noobs’

Hi! I’m glad you’re interested in Zcash! But, please don’t be a jerk about it. We’re working hard to make Zcash mining as fair and transparent as possible. The Zcash Company and its employees will not engage in any mining except for testing purposes.

We aren’t 100% sure yet what algorithm we’re going to be using, but we’ll be very public and transparent about it.

Keep an eye on FINAL zcash mining specifications - #8 by notsofast. Thanks to @notsofast for doing the work of organizing the information.

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Hope when mining starts, it’s available on Linux, Windows, Mac, not only Linux, it’s fair to all platform miners.

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