Bitcoin Forum

Alternate cryptocurrencies => Mining (Altcoins) => Topic started by: whfct on June 09, 2017, 11:22:31 PM



Title: Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability
Post by: whfct on June 09, 2017, 11:22:31 PM
Over the last month, daily mining profitability for ETH has more often than not exceeded ZEC. This has been a function of the rise in the price of ETH and a significant increase in ZEC mining difficulty (which far exceeded the relative increase in ETH difficulty). It is now more profitable to mine ETH and buy ZEC, than to mine directly.

Which does beg the question: Why has the ZEC network hashrate remained so high? I would have expected an equilibrium of sorts between ZEC and ETH profitability.

Chart below for the equivalent of three GTX 1070 cards: 90 MH Ethash and 1.2 KSol Equihash.

https://i.imgur.com/9XTDvRR.png


Title: Re: Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability
Post by: adaseb on June 09, 2017, 11:40:06 PM
Because there are a million or so old GPUs like the Radeon 7970/280X which people bought and kept during the Litecoin mining days. That card performs very well only with ZEC and cannot mine ETH properly due to DAG memory limitations.



Title: Re: Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability
Post by: whfct on June 10, 2017, 05:46:31 PM
Because there are a million or so old GPUs like the Radeon 7970/280X which people bought and kept during the Litecoin mining days. That card performs very well only with ZEC and cannot mine ETH properly due to DAG memory limitations.

That's interesting. I hadn't realized that.


Title: Re: Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability
Post by: Walrusbonzo on June 10, 2017, 06:15:53 PM
Because there are a million or so old GPUs like the Radeon 7970/280X which people bought and kept during the Litecoin mining days. That card performs very well only with ZEC and cannot mine ETH properly due to DAG memory limitations.



7950/7970/280x have enough memory to mine ETH. So it's not that.


Title: Re: Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability
Post by: adaseb on June 10, 2017, 06:22:26 PM
Because there are a million or so old GPUs like the Radeon 7970/280X which people bought and kept during the Litecoin mining days. That card performs very well only with ZEC and cannot mine ETH properly due to DAG memory limitations.



7950/7970/280x have enough memory to mine ETH. So it's not that.

Yes it is. Its not the memory capacity but the GCN limitation due to thrashing.



Title: Re: Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability
Post by: Ossidalm on June 10, 2017, 06:32:34 PM
Because there are a million or so old GPUs like the Radeon 7970/280X which people bought and kept during the Litecoin mining days. That card performs very well only with ZEC and cannot mine ETH properly due to DAG memory limitations.



7950/7970/280x have enough memory to mine ETH. So it's not that.

Yes it is. Its not the memory capacity but the GCN limitation due to thrashing.



that is right. So the 280x is slower now as the dag file is bigger.