MinerGate is happy to announce the integration of Zcash! In this post we will give you a quick insight on how to mine it on our pool and why it is an awesome new currency. 

 

HTTPS for money

Zcash developers wanted to design a currency that would take privacy for companies and individual users to a whole new level, a Holy Grail for any cryptocurrency. Thus, they came up with a rather complex zero-knowledge proving scheme. It makes it possible to conceal some details of transactions, such as the sender, receiver and the amount sent. It is visible on the blockchain that transaction actually took place. As the team puts it, “if Bitcoin is like http for money, Zcash is https”.

Sprout up

 Zcash blockchain was launched on October 28, 2016. Its genesis blocks was mined and first digital tokens were distributed. That software release and blockchain’s initial phase were titled ‘Sprout’ as a metaphor for promising young creation.

Zcash is a fork of Bitcoin protocol, although it stretches the major coin’s capabilities, mainly with privacy improvements we’ve mentioned before. Its block time is 4 times faster, as new blocks are found about every 2.5 minutes. The leader of the project, Zooko Wilcox, explains that it has positive impact on the liquidity and transaction times.

The similarities include the block reward halvings approximately every 4 years and the amount of coins determined to be mined over time – 21 millions. 10% of tokens to be issued are determined to be credited to Zcash team, its founders, employees and investors. It is a great incentive for building a strong viable product and high quality maintenance overtime, something that Bitcoin lacks.To find more details about Zcash, visit its official knowledge base. 

 

Zcash on MinerGate

 We were so excited to add Zcash to MinerGate that we decided to make the process as fast as possible and integrate it through alternative miners first while still working on our GUI application.Zcash mining on MinerGate is available via the most popular and trusted alternative miners, such as NiceHash, Claymore’s and SILENTARMY miners. You can start mining it on Windows and Linux systems with CPU and OpenCL or CUDA graphics cards.All you need to do is to choose the miner you prefer that would support your system and hardware. Please find the specifications  below. Detailed instructions are available in the FAQ article “How to mine Zcash with console miner?“. Start.bat files can be downloaded at “Supported miners” page.

• NiceHash Zcash miner
  OS: Windows x64, Linux
  Supports mining on CPU, CUDA, OpenCL
  Settings
  CPU  nheqminer -l zec.pool.minergate.com:3357 -u YOUR_EMAIL
  CUDA  nheqminer_cuda_tromp -l pool.minergate:3357 -u YOUR_EMAIL -cd 0
  OpenCL  nheqminer_cuda_tromp -l pool.minergate:3357 -u YOUR_EMAIL -od 0
• SILENTARMY Zcash minerOS: Linux
  Supports mining on OpenCL (including NVidia cards)
  Settings
  OpenCL silentarmy -c stratum+tcp://zec.pool.minergate.com:3357 -u YOUR_EMAIL
• Claymore’s Zcash AMD GPU miner
  OS: Windows x64
  Supports mining on CPU
  Settings
  Open the folder containing the miner and right-click on config.txt. Choose Edit and change it as in the example below.-zpool zec.pool.minergate.com:3357
  -zwal YOUR_EMAIL
  -zpsw x
  #-tt 75
  -i 2
  -allpools 1
  Execute the start.bat

MinerGate team hopes that you will enjoy making profit with Zcash mining on MinerGate. For troubleshooting, please contact our support team and we will be glad to assist.