Zcash as a cryptocurrency traditionally offered more security and anonymity than other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Metropolis Ethereum hard fork deployed Zk-SNARKs to allow the same sort of zero-knowledge proofs to work with Ethereum that currently makes Zcash so secure and anonymous. Zcash mining uses the Equihash algorithm, which is the same algorithm the new GPU mineable fork of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Gold, will use. AMD GPUs are not as capable as comparable Nvidia GPUs for mining Zcash, but it can still be done, and quite profitably so.

The Miner

The fastest miner for Zcash that works with AMD GPUs is the Claymore Zcash Miner. You may recognize the name from the popular Claymore Dual Miner. This is not the same program, but was developed by the same developer. Claymore Dual Miner will not work for mining Zcash. Cyrrently the latest version of Claymore Zcash Miner is v12.6. It can be found on its Nanopool Github page. There is a 1% DevFee written into Claymore Zcash Miner, so 1% of the time your rig will break away from mining to your wallet to mine to the developer's.

The 7 GPUs on the Cryptoscythe v 0.2 combined their hashrates to approach 2100 H/s; nothing like what the 6 GTX 1070s on the Cryptoscythe v0.1's 2800 H/s. In Zcash lingo, hashes/second or H/s is usually called solutions/second or Sol/s, so when you encounter hashrates referred to as Sol/s, you know you are looking at an Equihash hashrate.

The Wallet

As with any cryptocurrency, you need a wallet to collect mining rewards in. For Windows users, Zcash4win is an excellent and easy to use wallet node. It can be downloaded from their website, https://zcash4win.com/. Zcash4win is a Java-based SwingUI Wallet which will look very familiar if you have used other SwingUI wallets (like HUSH Wallet UI and many others). The latest version, 1.0.11, was just released in late August, 2017. If you are not a fan of performing command line operations to use your wallet, Zcash4win is a great choice.