That’s not a super easy question to answer. Especially since ZEC isn’t the only coin that went down. There’s a lot happening now and a lot coming up in the world of crypto currency. BTC can’t get their shit together and decide what they’re doing and that’s having a negative effect on all crypto is most likely the biggest culprit.
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This chart may help:
- Network hashrate continued to climb as new miners encouraged by the sharp increase in value since mid-May (“close” price) brought rigs online (note the run on GPUs)
- Difficulty, being a function of hashrate, followed the hashrate trajectory.
- ZEC softened as speculators took profit and the market thought twice about its exuberance.
- Hashrate continued to come online, driving difficulty. The increase in hashrate decreased revenue disproportionately to the drop in ZEC price.
Even if the price of ZEC remains far below recent highs, mining remains profitable and equipment on back order will still be deployed. As a result, don’t expect to see the growth in difficulty slow in the near-term.
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The above chart was created in a Jupyter notebook using Python and pandas. I’ve published the notebook here. It refreshes hourly with new data.
I banged it together pretty quickly with the intention of exploring the data. The code is by no means pretty. 
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Marvelous, I am interested in where to get source data and show it.
The notebook includes URLs to the source data.
Cool. The charts show that most of the time mining ETH is more profitable than mining ZEC.
8 hours difference 20% … 330 to 270…
This really depends on what cards you have. I used 90 MH for ETH and 1200 KSol for ZEC as this is equivalent to the output of 3 GTX 1070s. Using AMD cards would likely favor ETH profitability at times.
look at the bigger picture… 6 month difference, $48 in january 2017 to $290 now 27 june 2017.
since january the mining profit really increased a lot, a lot more than the network difficulty.
and now it went up more than 30% in less than 2 days again, welcome to crypto currencies
try to look at the longer term, more relaxing
I love how people panic at the first sign of turmoil. If you are panicking at the price drops / pool hashrate increase, then you are in the wrong game. This isn’t a short play, this is a long play. I’m pretty sure people who backed out of BTC when it was just barely profitable are kicking themselves now.
If you want to mine, mine because you think ZEC will reach levels similar to BTC. If you are mining for short term profit, you should do your nerves a favor and quit now. As long as it’s profitable for me, I will continue to mine and just sit on my balance until it either spikes or dies.
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should we keep pray for similar virus appear every month
Volatility ROCKS people. Lets shake out the posers so the players have more room to roam! Sack up or get out. This whining it for the birds. You are in the equivalent of the lawless wild west with cryptos right now. Guess what, anything you think is impossible, is likely what is coming. That includes the bad and the good.
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Volatility and the wild west are the two factors why this space is so worthwhile and ripe for the taking than legacy where hourly movement is dry (equities, futures etc.).
Shout out to all the old bloods entering in and expecting if they apply the same methods they’ll get the same outcomes as before.
Well surprise motherfuckers, this is the NCO!
time to start placing some buying orders soon i think 
With the Price going back up, I was expecting my Profits to go back up but its hardly changed? Has the Difficulty increased that much?
The price hasn’t really gone up that much. It’s not so much the difficult that is the problem at the moment, it is the network hash rate. According to flypool the estimated average network hash rate is 242.5M. A few weeks ago this was less than 200M. Remember that the total number of coins mined per day is capped at 7200, so the greater the network hash rate, the greater your miners need to perform to get the same amount of coins.
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So a question to the more experienced on this forum.
when the average network hash is too high and the profit drops out, who blinks first and moves to different coin?
i would expect a drop off from new miners (those that can do maths), then it comes down to those that believe in the coins future vs making money now.
For the make money now crowd i would presume the big boys would move first as it is a commercial operation and as long they can make more elsewhere, followed by small miners because hey - I get free power etc.
Those that believe will pretty much shrug and wait for the Zcash team to finally bring out a wallet that does secure transactions from mobile devices etc.
I do worry about our hash rate when Eth changes model though, thats a lot of has power that will be looking for use.
I also have to say my understanding of things says that Eulersheep is not quite right.
The higher hash rate does affect our odds of getting a block of course, HOWEVER it ALSO affects difficulty.
As he said the mined coins per day is capped. So the higher the hash rate the greater the difficulty has to be. The 2 are tied together, not independent entities. So in essence, the higher the hash rate the higher the difficulty in order to balance it out.
So the mining game is always a trade off. More people means longer term success hopefully, HOWEVER it also means lower returns now.
So in essence what he said is correct, but saying difficulty isn’t the problem isn’t correct. Difficulty is just a calculation of hash rate and mean time for coins.