Charting ETH vs ZEC Mining Profitability

[whfct]

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

[adaseb]

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.

[whfct]

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.

[Walrusbonzo]

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.

[adaseb]

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.

[Ossidalm]

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.