Miners mining Zcash in order to acquire Bitcoin

Mining
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This is really interesting data!

“From our conversations with Equihash miners, the most popular strategy is to mine Zcash (“ZEC”) and, on a weekly-basis, convert all the Altcoin proceeds into Bitcoin.”

This is from Luxor, who say that they are the largest North American mining pool, and who recently arranged to mine the first ever Zcash block with shielded coinbase! :slight_smile:

Hey @nitronick600, can you tell us more about this — how many of your customers are “mercenaries” (mine ZEC in order to immediately sell it for BTC), and how many of them are “patriots” (mine ZEC in order to receive ZEC)?

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I don’t know why miners would do that when Luxor offer Switch. Mine most profitable equihash coin and then it get payed out in BTC. Usually get 2-7% more BTC that if you mined straight ZEC and sold it to BTC.

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The large majority of our hashrate comes through Switch, which is that “mercenary”-style miner.

Of the hashrate at Luxor, about 1/5th would be considered ZCash “patriots”; miners contributing directly to the ZCash network and getting payouts in ZCash. It’s hard to say exactly what percentage of these miners are liquidating immediately, but I’m sure that percentage is non-zero.

It’s an interesting conundrum miners are faced with: Do I optimize for a single network or sell my services to the highest bidder?

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