The emergence of new altcoins is drastically different from printing new fiat money. Inflation decreases the value of each currency unit while every new (decent) cryptocurrency is a brand new technology that has value in itself and the demand from the public makes this money worth something. It means that the cryptocurrency market is a market of technologies associated with different altcoins, and it's understood that any market wins if it presents really diverse products.
There has been a lot said about the different use cases of different cryptocurrencies, but there's an overlooked aspect — many people judge the quality of this or that cryptocurrencies not by the way it can be spent or stored, but by the way it can be mined or sell.
The Miner's Perspective On Altcoins
It's important to realize that not all altcoins or tokens are designed to be mined. In this article, we will focus on the currencies that can be mined by enthusiasts without using industrial mining farms.
Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum lack ASIC-resistance which considered by some as an advantage because ASIC-devices are costly and allegedly this circumstance makes the 51% attack on these networks less probable. Nevertheless, Ethereum is still can be effectively mined via GPUs in the mining pools.
As Ethereum is going to change the consensus algorithm from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, some people still prefer the earliest architecture of this cryptocurrency known as Ethereum Classic. Miners are glad to provide the community with this coin because the mining of Ethereum Classic doesn't require too expensive hardware despite the relatively high price. Bitcoin Gold is a close example.
All of the cryptocurrencies based on the CryptoNight algorithm were available for merged mining for a long time. It means that two of these coins could be mined simultaneously without the decrease of hashing power. After a series of hard forks, some CryptoNight coins became not compatible with merged mining.
Such highly private currencies as Monero and Zcash have quite a huge following in the miners' community. Users value these altcoins for the high level of anonymity of transactions while miners enjoy the combination of ASIC-resistance (which makes mining of these coins via GPU or CPU power profitable) and a good market price. The way Monero maintains its ASIC-resistance is establishing new versions via forking.
Hard Forks
Hard forks provide a choice to keep on mining a familiar coin or to follow the active part of the community and switch to a new altcoin that is different from the previous version. So hard forks provide both the updating of the coin and increase the number of available options (e. g. Litecoin was created as a Bitcoin's fork, and both currencies still have significant traction). Miners should always be aware of the upcoming hard forks in order to get prepared and decide which coin to mine.
The Use Of ASIC Device
Some people own ASIC miners without having huge mining farms. If connected to mining pools these devices are capable of mining such top cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin and Bitcoin.
Mining Pools
Mining pools help to gather miners' power together in order to mine the coins more effectively. The rewards get divided between the participants. Different hardware and software define the efficiency of mining of this or that coins. The way miners configure their mining rigs brings effect, too. The best platforms for experimentation and finding out the most profitable configuration are multi-currency mining pools. For example, in such pool as MinerGate, you can try mining all the mentioned currencies. Switching from one coin to another without switching to another pool (with a different design, rules, and so on) is really comfortable. Of course, this advantage of the use of mining pool is good not only for experimentation but simply because it's easier to mine all needed coins using the same account and interface.
Conclusion
The opportunity of mining different altcoins helps all kinds of miner finding their niche and growing out of it little by little (if needed). Diversity on the market strengthens the circulation of all altcoins, and attract new people to use cryptocurrencies (each person may have a specific "gate coin" for an introduction to the world of cryptocurrencies) while mining of numerous currencies helps to support the networks and verify the blockchain records. This activity is still essential for the crypto community.
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