I’m starting this thread as an offshoot of the Price Speculation thread. Mining is a very hot topic when it comes to determining price. Also I want to hear others thoughts on the best way to mine.
Don’t! In fact everyone except me should stop mining.
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Some questions about what will happen in the future:
1 - Will ETH miners come onto ZEC when ETH goes POS?
2 - Will ETH miners go to BTG instead of ZEC?
3 - Will ZEC miners head to BTG when BTG comes out?
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I will have to look into BTG. Can you send a link to information on it. I like to diversify, but most likely wouldn’t move all my rigs over to that. I never cared for ETH because the as the DAG grew, you had to upgrade to compensate for it.
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I’m sure etherium miners have already begun mining zcash it’s a logical switch unless another coun is more profitable, I’m only mining zec, running a five-card rig and doesn’t cost me much to run in the first place so even once it becomes supossedly unprofitable ill probably just keep mining it then eventually dismantle at PoS instead of switching, maybe im just old fashioned
I’ve examined my current rigs and know I can boost profits with upgraded cards. I have 1 1050 ti that will get replaced when my 1070 comes back. I can net at least $100+ on ebay for that. Once Kraken gets me money back I am taking that and buying 2 more 1070s to replace 1060s. I can sell those and take all the money to buy one more 1070. By my calculations I should then be able to get back to where I was before the difficulty on Flypool changed. Knowing my luck though, the difficulty will get worse before I get the cards.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but has anyone noticed the number of miners and the hash rate of Flypool is starting to slowly decline?
I wonder if there’s a graph anywhere of the number of miners operating on Flypool on a daily basis?
@btcgpu is Bitcoin Gold’s Twitter page. There’s little information on it right now other than it’s on the way. I am not aware of any pools for it, and who knows if any exchanges will trade it.
I have a small mining operation getting about 9kH/s. Since Bitcoin Gold will be using the Equihash algorithm, I am wondering if it will be more profitable to mine it for a time when it arrives.
My logic is simple. Since the difficulty for ZEC is quite high, and the price is low(er than I’d like), it might be a good idea to switch over to bitcoin gold for a bit and get any lower hanging fruit. I can see some miners heading there, but more will come when ETH goes POS, which isn’t in the near term from what I understand.
I stay with ZEC because I love the technology behind it, and the alternatives for my personal mining capacity are pretty much rubbish. This new one might be attractive for a while.
Also, some may be welcoming this new coin since it will be gpu minable. Both ZEC and ETH miners can mine BTG well, and since some of those will head there - like I may - it may reduce the difficulty somewhat…or not! If it does help the difficulty it will be good for those who stay 
The moral of this story is that we have a new force which may draw current ZEC miners away and one which can capture ETH miners as well when it becomes POS. Both of those could/may affect the difficulty to the positive.
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It looks like FlyPool has dropped a little in the last 24 hours.
It seems Europe is dominating. I’m going to keep watching to see if miners are jumping ship for something else. Could be the price and difficulty is not doing anything for them.
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it would be great, but i think that this is only for few days and trend turn up again … btw why flypool stop report top tens of biggest miners on their main page
The 400$ price at the beginning of the week attracted a lot of miners over on the Zec side. Now that the price is down again (265$ zec, 296$ eth) i hope the overall difficulty will fall a bit:
Zcash Difficulty Chart - ZEC Difficulty - CoinWarz
So, aside from an algorithm change, what in the hell is the point of Bitcoin Gold? I’m not sure it’s a good thing if a project like that actually succeeds. What’s the message? Create a hard fork of an established crypto, swap the algo, and create value! How is this, at its core, really any different than an ICO scheme?
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I think they want to be independent of bitmain and be asic resistant. Many BTC miners are annoyed by one company kind of dictating the chain so much.
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Being ASIC resistant is a huge draw for any miner. I would give it a try and see if you can get a few coins that might have value or not. That’s the risk that we take on a new coin. People took a chance with ZCash and look how that turned out.
Very true. I am very curious on the profitability on BTG. Looks like I will stack up on Zec until I run some calcs for BTG.
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Just like buying a new car, or anything…I think it’s exceptionally risky to go after a board like this ahead of any user reviews / before they have a chance to fine-tune QC.
That being said, I have always had good luck with ASUS boards; I like the fact that there’s support for multiple PSUs built-in and that the lanes are preset(hard wired) to GEN 1.
But Zcash had something behind it: implementation of a cutting edge cryptographic technique behind its shielded addresses and transactions. What’s the progressive element of BTG? What’s its niche? There are already a bunch of Equihash coins.
On a side note…I know we toss about the term “ASIC-resistant” in reference to Equihash by virtue of its memory-intensive compute structure. That being said, what physical limitation of ASIC-design prohibited scaling of memory on these boards such that they can’t be made to efficiently work this algo?
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I definitely think that BTG has the wrong approach. If they really would have something to add to the crypto world, the would have started a new chain instead of just forking.
The forking is purely so people will join in to get the forked coins and sell them. That is the only reason It will have users. For the rest it is just another bitcoin fork.
I think we will see a lot of bitcoin forks in the coming year that all will try to profit directly from the success of bitcoin.
If you look at it like this you can also say, why didn’t Zcash fork off the bitcoin chain? Because it is a self respecting currency that believes it has unique selling points and can draw users on its own.
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I’m not debating the worth or potential worth of Bitcoin Gold and didn’t reference it to derail the thread. I referenced it for the reason that when looking at ZEC price v difficulty, I see that negative inertia can build with ZEC miners since we can be put into a position where it becomes unprofitable for some to continue to mine. Because of that, ZEC miners can be “listening” for new opportunities towards which to focus their mining power.
Surely there are other Equihash coins, but since BTCG is getting attention, it may, as I previously stated, be an opportunity for some ZEC miners to get into the action early, especially if the price v difficulty of ZEC continues in the present direction.
Speculating further, then, there is another potential new force down the road with ETH POS. There will be miners looking for something, and ZEC is an obvious target. However, if they perceive better value from BTCG, then they will head there. Ultimately, it’s all about what opportunities continue to exist for us ZEC miners and fans in the near term and the various elements we’re likely to be facing.
Surely debating the speculative elements of what to mine and when to mine it are different from the debate of which has the greater value between ZEC and BTCG. Indeed, as we’re likely to agree, ZEC has some real value in the sense that it uses zk proofs and gives us users real privacy if we want it. When using it in a “t” transaction, it’s really nothing special, but the “z” transaction is the essence of its real value.
BTCG, however, is just another coin…ho hum if you ask me. I believe they are wanting to capitalize on the momentum of BTC and offer a coin which is GPU mininable. What differentiates its name and benefits from the rest of the herd is not much from what I know. But in any event, if ETH miners flock to it and ZEC miners head there too for its “perceived benefits”, great!
Because really all I want is to see high ZEC price and low ZEC difficulties!
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