Surprisingly I haven't seen major difficulty spikes yet on the ZCash network. The price of ZEC has gone down, and profitability with it. I think I'm going to put my ZEC miners to work on Ubiq/Musicoin or some other profitable coin, maybe even Nicehash. The ZEC miners I have are all equipped with 3 gig cards.

https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/zcash-difficulty-chart

With all these ASICs targeting POW coins, too much crazy money is spent chasing that "perfect ASIC miner".

In the last 3 years, in this chasing game, I was lucky only once, getting a good chunk of early X11 ASICs circa 2016 with Baikals (pre-Giants), and it was purely by chance when nobody was paying attention to newer X11 ASICs and the sudden rise of DASH. Even Baikal probably thought they sold the gear too cheap to my group. Those were the days.

Today, the game is well beyond our control, we get scraps and the "membership fee" to the mining club will soon start 10k and above.

Currently, my group's crypto earnings shows, more than 50% now comes from crypto-currency trading, 30% SHA256 and only 20% from GPU and other POW ASICs.

I think its time for us to re-think our mining strategies, otherwise we just wasting money supporting Bitmain's evil gameplans and experiments.

Experienced miners doing trading gets better results due to our knowledge in crypto mining and how that coin is mined and supported in the crypto ecosystem.

Therefore, why not invest directly into that promising new coin instead?

I kinda miss buying s3's for $40, mining for 3-4 months then selling them for $60 and finding another for $40 to take its place....

What do you guys think about BCI (Bitcoin Interest)? Lately I see it has good profit for equihash algo if we trust whattomine says.
I'm not sure about this one, that's why I'm asking you

Now I looked at it. It is paying about 2% interest  a month.

I simply fail to see how they can pay 2% a month. 18 million of 21 million coins have been mined.

This coin reminds me of ppc

I won’t get involved in pos/pow coins that pay interest.

I won’t get involved in pos coin that pay interest.

I fail to see how these coins can generate 2% a month.

Problems abound due to the huge fall runup.

Bitmain saw really big profits last year.


So much so they got ideas on what to do with excess profits.

I find it very interesting that  innosilicon now has

A better zec miner more hash less power.
A better decred miner more hash less power.
A better sia miner more hash less power.
A better sha miner more hash less power.

As compared to bitmain.

Yeah bitmain is cheaper but the specs are better for innosilicon.

Forcing the hand of bitmain i like this.
I like how the decred miner is bogo but it’s 6k for one lol
In a few months I’m sure bitmain will bring something out that will bring a punch to the competitor

At this point my preferred ASIC is a GPU. Thanks to Phil, I am now mining with current technology. I have a sidehack modded S7-LN that is nice and quiet, but is now losing money with the lower prices and higher diff. Not losing a lot, but for the ~450 Watts that it consumes, I can power another 2 x 1080TI rig, and that will at least be profitable today, flexible so it can adjust to algo changes with a miner software update, and have a chance at achieving ROI eventually with my US$0.10/kWh power at home.

Regarding investing in promising new coins, I have staked Motion(XMN) and MoonDEX(MDEX) master nodes, 1 each, to see how that goes. Each seem promising, and with the challenges that CryptoBridge is experiencing, I think that there is room for multiple players in the DEX space. Hopefully I have speculated wisely. For now I plan to hodl, but if the prices for each of the coins rise sufficiently, I am not averse to moving the earnings to BTC, ETH, or even on to some other speculative coin.

I also really like Phil's idea of solar-only mining, with no grid-tie backup. My current residence has a sizable southern exposure with little shade, and I'd be interested in setting up a small (two or three 250-300 Watt panels) system. It would be cool if adding the ability to scale up just by adding panels wouldn't require too much up-front cost to the small system install.

I'd be interested in adding a small(ish) battery backup for the system because I'd like to be able to gracefully shut down the miner(s) (I'm thinking of only GPU mining with a linux based system) when the output of the solar panels drops below that required to support the mining gear. I'm thinking that a raspberryPI could be used for the monitoring, with the ability to ssh into the miner to safely shut down, and managing a switched outlet(s) for the mining gear. The rPI would stay running and when the power output from the solar panels reached a sufficiently high level it would enable the switched outlet and the miner would boot. The rPI could also act as an ethernet to wifi router for connectivity to my home network.

If you are interested in Solar, HomePower is a decent publication to get (digital issues/print issues, access to all back copies in digital PDF format).  You can do small solar pretty easily with good crimpers, Chinese connectors, and so forth.