How much of the current mining network will persist as the Zcash price comes down to Earth?
My guess is that at least some miners are only seeing a worthwhile return in the immediate future and beyond that they won’t continue.
I’m sure some will, but if it stays above or around even 1BTC it will be at least a little profitable for a lot of people even without special rigs. I’m mining on a few year old gaming laptop and even with the reduced block rewards I’m earning 7x what I’m spending on electricity right now with ZEC valued @ 2.7BTC.
As long as it stays more profitable than ETH the difficulty will continue to rise.
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No doubt, it’s hard to say what will happen. With all the hype around Zcash a lot of people are mining for the first time with their everyday computers and eventually they’ll stop as profits die down and they want to use their PCs for other things again.
I don’t think it’s so much hard to say what will happen as when it will happen. How long will it take to exhaust demand from people who must have no idea how far the price will drop (because Zcash has yet to find a vibrant market for use) and how long it will take for it to build steam assuming it finds that use case market.
Then you’ve got your next tier of buyers who really do get the risk and the time to mature, but are still willing to park some decent money for years to get in early. Will that demand carry on throughout the slow start, maybe even a little longer?
But it has to be the profit miners with caches of core i7s and high end radeons driving difficulty, not the poorly equipped newbs like myself adding 5-10s/s each. And the profit miners will flow, as always, to the more profitable coins when the price meets reality. Though if it is newbs who are actually like me, that’d be scary. I don’t care what the price is. I’ve been following Zcash since last year and am looking to get ZECs to hold for years.
My biggest concern is the coverage of the price crash. I imagine bloggers ignoring the reason for the initial high price (scarcity and it looks like some new inexperienced buyers too) and covering the price crash as proof that zcash is a fad already passed. Depending on how much shallow dumb coverage it gets and whether that gets picked up by bloomberg, fortune etc, that could do a lot of damage with the financial sector people eyeing Zcash for the long term.
the idea is to mine as much as you can and as fast as you can within this week or next… afterwards gpu miners will overtake cpus in terms of speeds and size. my guess is in a month and onwards difficulty will be skyhigh while price is in the range of 0.005 or so…