Zcash Mining Pools

If you are new to this, perhaps the easiest way to choose a pool would be to look at the hash rate. Higher hash rate indicates better efficiency and potentially more frequent profit. Here is a list of the top five Zcash mining pools in comparison based on their hash rate. The key parameters include market share, server location, reward system and fees.

The location of the server is really important and is advisable that it’s near the location you mine in, so the latency could be lower. The fees are just a small price to pay, so you can be sure that you’ll receive a steady income frequently. Ultimately, you should aim to choose the pool that is the most cost effective for you. There are several more factors that can play a role in your pool choice. For more in-depth information about this, you can check the guide on “How to choose the right mining pool”. You can also look at the article covering all about the different reward systems.

Another thing worth mentioning is to have a few backup pools in case your first choice is down at some point. This will assure that the mining process remains uninterrupted.

Mining Pools Without Registration

In order to join the pools, you will need to go through a fairly easy registration process and provide an email address. However, if you worry about your privacy, you can also join one that does not require a registration. Here is a list of some free-of-registration pools:

The joining process is really easy. You’re not actually registering on the pool’s website, rather on your PC. Zcash pools mine using GPU for which you will need to download a software, run it and then use the easy quickstart configuration, I have provided for each pool.

The calculator can be used to see how profitable the best Zcash mining pool could be for you. All you have to do is enter your currency, hash rate, power consumption, electricity cost, and the pool fee. All that’s left to do is to click “calculate”. To calculate your cloud mining profit, you need to enter only the hash rate and the fee.

The calculations are done based on the current market price and the current difficulty. They are very dependent on the constantly changing variables. The output will display your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly profit, as well as the approximate electricity cost and the amount of mined coins. Whenever you’re checking the results just make sure that the profit is higher than the costs.

Setting up your own Zcash mining pool can be very profitable for you. You can collect the rewards, as well as fees from all the miners. It is also helping for the decentralization of the mining power. However, to a certain degree, it can be difficult to set it up yourself. I’ve prepared a list for you showing the basic requirements for a pool setup. You will need a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with at least:

If you don’t think you can handle all the hardware setup, you can just rent a VPS and only configure the software.

The majority of the Zcash mining pool servers are located in Europe, Asia, and America. This could be because most miners are in places with low electricity costs, which is usually around the pool server locations. Moreover, the location is also important, because the miners need to be close to the servers, so the latency remains low.

Centralization of all ZEC Pools

Zcash is a fairly small coin in the context of all cryptocurrencies. It operated mainly using GPU, however, recently it was made possible to mine using ASIC. This led to a massive increase of hash rate in several pools and opened a door to a potential 51% attack threat. At the moment the mining power in the Zcash network seems to be fairly centralized.

Pool Distribution (calculate by blocks)

Pool	Hashrate Share
Nanopool	25%
Mining Pool Hub	18%
Suprnova.cc	8%
Flypool	4%
Slush pool	3%
Other pools	42%

Zcash project summary

Zcash was developed as an improved protocol of Zerocoin. It has the option to conceal recipient, sender and transaction amounts. This and some of its other benefits had contributed to the rapid growth of its usage. In the future, it is expected to collaborate with Ethereum. The long-term goal is to create a bridge between both currencies and continue the improvement of Zcash through new developments.