This Kenyan developer is mining Zcash from his living room & it’s fun

With global organizations such as Dell, Microsoft, Expedia accepting bitcoin and other blockchain-based cryptocurrencies such Ethereum, ZCash among others, trade and mining of cryptocurrencies is becoming an everyday activity around the world.

However, in Africa digital mining of cryptocurrencies is not a mainstream activity and ponzi schemes like OneCoin are instead gaining popularity especially in East Africa. To put an end to scams such as OneCoin adn ZetaCoin, Kenyan developer Eugene Mutai is mining ZCash on his own and its fun.

“You can mine tonnes of other digital currencies,” he posted on his wall. “Which are actually much more profitable than Bitcoin. In my case I’ve been mining Ethereum & ZCash. I built this one mid July and it’s been running a little over 28 days now. It only requires an internet connection and power,”

The developer chose ZCash over bitcoin because bitcoin requries special miners called ASIC which are expensive and very rare. Though his mine has several months to go, he says cryptomining is profitable and anyone can make good money out of it. Though volatile, cryptocurrencies are mostly unaffected by fluctuations in the economy especially during an election, civil unrest or inflation as they are digital and decentralised.

Mutai, an Andela developer based in Kenya says he using a 3.2 Ghz Core i5 7500 PC with an 8 GB RAM, 120 GB SSD running Windows 10 and 8 Nvidia Asus 1080 Tis graphics cards with 11GB RAM consuming a total of 2300W.

With the 1080 Tis, Mutai says he’s currently doing 5600 Sols/s, one of the highest solutions mined per second. For those who want to try it at home, Mutai is mining on windows 10, using EBFW miner which is awesomely optimized for Zcash. Conceived as “Zerocash” in 2014 by researchers from MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and Tel Aviv University, the privacy-focused digital currency allows users to make anonymous transactions without trace.

READ Meet Bitcoin ’s biggest fan: IBM

There are new developments coming to Though Zcash such as the disclosure feature for parties involved in the transaction and a Cross-Chain Atomic Transactions (XCAT) to enable enable inter-Blockchain transactions involving leading digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

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