I've already sent complaints to Bittrex and WhatToMine about the MISLABLING of Bitcoin Cash as "BCC".

 BCC has long been used by BitConnect Coin, calling Bitcoin Cash "BCC" is an error that NEEDS to be addressed frequently and often 'till the folks that are committing that error FIX it.

Bitcoin Cash is properly listed as BCH - BCC is BitConnect Coin that long predates Bitcoin Cash.

 Sounds like the right ballpark - ZCash tends to not push a GPU super hard, lotta folks running it at 100 watt ballpark on GTX 1070 cards (nominal 151+ TDP) to still get over 400 sol/sec (vs perhaps 450 for a super-pushed card).

 It's a LOT less power hungry than some of the stuff I've done with my Gigabyte R9 280x 3-fan Windforce cards.

 I've never run my mining farm on dialup - that MIGHT be pushing bandwidth limits a LITTLE for a largish farm but should be fine for just a few mining rigs.

 I did run it for a few years on a very poor quality Virgin Mobile 3G cell connection, that hit 400kbps on a GOOD wee hours of the night and was usually more like 150-200, no issues.
 I did run it for 2 years on an Exede sat connection (which was a MAJOR UPGRADE from the 3G except SOMETIMES on lag), the 650-700ms ALL THE TIME lag cost less than 1% in stale shares on Litecoin or Ethereum mining and wasn't noticeable on Bitcoin mining.
 Exede was metered, but I normally used less than 100 megs a day and that was INCLUDING online gaming and web browsing, NOT just mining (Game PATCHES were sometimes an issue).

The Gigabyte cards usually didn't need a TheStilt bios, per his own comments they were pretty close to optimised already for mining usage.

 Cheaper, yes.

 Comparable efficiency AND comparable hashrate AND cheaper, no.

 When the current "mining shortage" price gouging dies out, the RX series will return to being a little less expensive on hash/$ (but will lose a little on hash/watt).

 Or go with the already mentioned Tahiti-based options if you can find a Tahiti-based card cheap enough.


 7950/7870/R9 280/R9 280x are all based on the same Tahiti GPU, the 7850 and R9 280 had a few of the cores disabled usually due to a manufacturing flaw in the chip though on occasion they had a few cores disabled in the BIOS because AMD didn't have enough "flawed" chips and had to use "good" ones.

4) NVMiners Crew decided to use BTC for several reasons, One of the key reason is that Our corporate policy does not allow receiving money from individuals.

 RED FLAG SCAM WARNING.

It was a real move - but very brief, perhaps a day and a half to 2 days during a short period where BCH was more profitable than BTC - but the move swamped the BCH network hashrate, diff went up a LOT, and now many or most of those miners are moving BACK to BTC.

 Nothing new here, "move to the more profitable coin" has a LONG history where alts on the same algo have existed (and even more so on CPU and GPU mineable coins where you're not limited to the same algo).

Should be no issue at all.

It sounds like what you are looking for are "Proof of Stake" coins.

The first thing you do is fire up your time machine and go 8 years or thereabouts into the past.

 THEN you might manage to mine BTC on a smartphone for something resembling a profit.

Namecoin is considered to be an altcoin - among quite a few other SHA256-based altcoins.

You need a RELIABLE internet connection, it doesn't need to be high-speed.

 You only need a computer that can use a browser to set up the S7, it runs ITSELF with a built-in small computer.

Folks did FPGA miners back in the day - NONE of them managed efficiencies that are even close to the old Antminer S5, much less CURRENT ASIC-based miners.

 FPGA are about flexability, they CAN'T compete with an IC that is optimised to do one thing only and do it very very well.


 If you want to compete with Bitmain, better pony up a bunch of $millions on doing some serious design work on your own ASIC - and cozy up to one of the folks with "next gen" processes in development to build that ASIC on.

 SFards was a merger between GridSeed (which made the original "dual miner" chip, Scypt and SHA256 with their GC3355) and WiiBox (which I believe made some of the controllers for the "bigger" Gridseed miners).
 The only reason the GC3355 survived for a significant period of time is that it was quite efficient on the Scrypt side - it's SHA256 side got passed VERY quickly - and that Scrypt wasn't attracting nearly as much competition in ASIC chips as SHA256 was.

 For perspective - the GC3355 was PROFITABLE by the time Litecoin hit $8 (and possibly a bit before that) in the current surge, and if you had 3c/KWH electric it was close to break-even even during the long Litecoin run in the $4-$5 range - because it's competition was NOT all that much more efficient. Even the L3+ is only about 10 times as efficient, despite being a few "nodes" newer tech and at least 2 full generations of miner newer.

 They failed because their chip was MARGINAL on SHA256 efficiency even when they announced it, took forever to get the miner to market, and the miner turned out to be VERY badly designed at the board level (an issue the Gridseed miners ALSO had) and unreliable, and the SHA256 efficiency BY THE TIME THEY BROUGHT IT TO MARKET was inferior to the competiton, but the price was so high the machine could NOT compete on the Scrypt side (despite being marginally more efficient than most existing Scrypt miners).

 The problem with doing a "dual algo" chip like that is you have to split the chip between the two - you CAN'T resuse much of it if you are doing multiple algos (exception for X11/X13/X15 which incorporate multiple different algos in series, so you CAN resuse most of the chip even if you're running one of the "lesser" algos like X11).

 FPGA isn't efficient enough to compete with ASIC where ASIC exists - FPGA is about flexability.

Can't crowd enough chips to do enough hashrate to make it worth doing.

There was a short term move over to BCH (BCC is NOT Bitcoin Cash, it's BitConnect Coin which LONG predates Bitcoin Cash) when it briefly got more profitable to mine than BTC - lasted perhaps a day and a half and collapsed the profitablity due to at least one MAJOR farm moving over, now it's moving back (almost all of it IS back) as BCH profitability collapsed due to the massive hashrate influx.

 Also, when Bitmain isn't shipping a batch of S9 units (and for a few days WHEN they are shipping a batch), the hashrate tends to be close to flat as nobody else is shipping or manufacturing large numbers of miners (yet).

 

 In my testing, EWBF 3.3 had a slight edge over Claymore 12.4

 I've not tried 3.4 on anything yet.

Tried installing the blockchain driver on a FRESH Win7 install yesterday.

Per it's release notes, it SPECIFICALLY states it supports the R9 290 (I had 2 of those in the machine) and it looked like it was supposed to support the "R7 graphics" in the A10-7860k in that machine.

 Actual results - it installed, but flat out did not recognise the A10 iGPU at all (came up as "standard VGA adapter" in device manager) and would not install on that no matter what I did.
 It SUPPOSEDLY installed on the R9 cards, but NO OPENCL SUPPORT both per GPU-Z and from trying to run openCL software like the DNet client, Claymore ZEC miner, and both Genoil and QTMiner for ETH - no matter what I tried, it flat out WOULD NOT INSTALL OpenCL.

 Without OpenCL support, there is ZERO POINT TO THIS BROKEN DRIVER VERSION.

 Makes me wonder, YET AGAIN, if AMD bothers TESTING their crap RElive bloatware on all of the cards and OS they CLAIM the stuff is supposed to work on.


 Machine is now happily working Moowrapper/BOINC/Dnet via LINUX (took me about an hour to "clone" a pre-built USB key installation over to that machine's HD - most of that waiting on DD to copy the installation over - thank goodness for 15.12 drivers!).


 AMD drivers have been such a total load of bloatware garbage often BROKEN nightmare since 15.12 (though some of the 16.x versions were tolerable) that I'm about to the point of just saying "forget AMD, I'm going all NVidia" for GPUs and I've been looking seriously into alternatives for my current "go-to" AM3+ based platform.

 I've ALREADY decided to completely ignore Vega (the pricing BS coupled with the low performance and INefficiency had me thinking "don't bother" already) and the RX 5xx series (after ONE MORE TIME around the "Relive is bloatware garbage" block, I refuse to even bother LOOKING at another Relive driver version ever again).

 Don't even get me STARTED on AMDGPU-PRO on the LINUX side - they're STILL trying to play catchup on support of even the R9 series, the available tools are an even bigger joke than ATICONFIG, no support AT ALL for Tahiti after 2 bloody YEARS but they can support low-end junk like the R7 250?
 NVidia LINUX support was a tossup for AMD even back in the fglrx days - since the move to AMDGPU it's been no competition at all.

 They don't seem to realise how much their "penny wise, pound foolish" short-sighted "don't care about LINUX, don't worry about putting competant work into drivers" attitude is poisoning the well among us long-time AMD fans.

 If AMD doesn't get their act together on GPUs, they might just find themselves in the position of being PERMANENTLY locked into trying to compete only in the "value" segment - and if it wasn't for cryptocoin mining, they'd be losing out even THERE at this point.

 That's not new to SHA256 - quite a few altcoins out there already to switch between, though most of them have been TINY compared to Bitcoin (like Namecoin or DGB) and therefore the profitability has bounced a lot on them.