Mining to shielded addresses + Community Mining Pool

Mining
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Here’s the situation. In Russia, from the beginning of 2025, all miners are obliged to provide their addresses for mining through official government bodies.

Naturally, many people have fair concerns about this, related to data leakage.

I believe that for Zcash this could be a point of growing attractiveness, because today miners in the majority do not know anything about shielding at all. For most, ZEC is either just one of the coins or they think it’s shielded by default. Not many people know about Z-addresses at all.

I could record an instructional video with hashtags mining and stuff, and run it on mining forums and such. And it could gain popularity I think.

But the problem is that none of the available pools for Zcash mining today support shielded addresses. Historically, there hasn’t been much need for it. NanoPool.org supported it and I chose it at one time for that very reason. But in 2022, if I’m not mistaken, they dropped support for Zcash in principle like a number of other large pools (we lost four pools in total.l). As a result we got this skewed hashrate in favor of ViaBTC, mainly because it had stable initial payouts and different modes PPS+, PPLNS, SOLO (who knows, knows).

First, I believe that any even new Pool mining from scratch can gain a huge advantage in Russia now, if it supports the addition of shielded addresses in this terms.

Second, I assume we should send out instructions on behalf of @ZCG to all pools on how this can be set up. And this is where the help of technical people is needed.

And thirdly, why don’t we start a Zcash community mining pool ourselves and supplement our Lockbox or NSM savings funds with 1-2% commissions (standard commission rate of popular pools)? And by the way, we would have no problem advertising this pool because it would be non-commercial in nature.

For your information @joshs @Dodger

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This is an interesting idea. I wish I knew what all is involved in setting one up.

What about contacting one of the OG pool runners from Zcashs GPU mining days?

I’m thinking of: Suprnova's ZCash Pool zec.suprnova.cc

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Hey folks, I mainly dropped the pool because I had a new project at my dayjob but the project is over now and if you like I can recreate a ZEC Pool using / paying to shielded addresses only or also a pool which accepts both addresses for payouts. The problem will be to move enough hashrate onto that pool that it finds blocks on a regular base and enough miners jump in.

Thanks for thinking of me @Shawn :slight_smile:

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That’s awesome! Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, it’s a big challenge to a certain extent, but we have ways to create some buzz for it. If it’s going to be an “official Zcash community pool” or something like that, the chances of success are high!

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Sure, I’d do 1% fee pool whereas 0.5% of the fee covers transactions costs etc. and the rest can be sponored to development or such. Let me get a fresh wallet installed onto a fresh server and i’ll prepare it :slight_smile:

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Yes, that’s the hardest part.

If we could promote it via social channels like @ZecHub, Telegram @gottabeJay , at Zcon etc… it could raise awareness.

Mining is cutthroat though, it’s difficult to get miners to move away from the “easy” money.

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The miners will lose nothing in this case. On the contrary, Russian miners will gain invulnerability. I am aware of the fact that the big players are not easy to reach. And they will most likely choose transparent addresses, since it is an organization, not the addresses of individuals. But the private persons will see this as an interesting proposition.

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Awesome! Thumbs up :shield:

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Absolutely ! :student:

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Hey folks, I’ve got the pool almost ready, testing went fine and I’ve already mined a few blocks, mining to unified addresses is possible and working fine. Everything should be ready to the weekend, hopefully we’ll get some ASIC’s over to mine at the pool :slight_smile:

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This is a huge contribution! Thank you!

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pool is ready at https://zec.suprnova.cc with EU and US stratum nodes online.

mining with unified addresses has been tested and is working, let me know if you need anything

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Thank you for re-launching this, and good luck!

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viabtc almost at 72% :cold_sweat:

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lets hope some people switch their asics over

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I will try to record a short video on the week for my YouTube-chanel and of course I will throw the information into all Russian-speaking miner chats in telegram.

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miners don’t care and neither does viabtc, it is as simple as that.

we need to find the biggest ZEC miners and talk to them!
do we know who they are and how to reach out to them?

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maybe there are some on discord ? whats the official discord ?

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ZecHub has a Discord: Zcash Global

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This is amazing. Thank you very much for setting it up. I have joined.

Is there a way you could share the pool with ZF? We currently maintain a fork of S-nomp for integration testing with Zebra, but that pool is old, and we had to patch it quite a bit to make it work. Having a pool used in production would help us a lot with testing the mining-related RPCs in Zebra.

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