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First of all, I wasn't sure if this should go here or on Off-Topic, so sorry if I got it wrong. 

Now, I am always looking for the passive income. Hence YouTube and some other things. But about 2 years ago I came across a video about how to mine BitCoin. I didn't watch it but I did bookmark it in Chrome. I watched it about a week ago and quickly found out that it was not a viable option. For all intents and purposes, BitCoin has been mined up. You need to spend about R60,000+ on hardware before it becomes economically viable for an individual. And even then only temporarily as the algorithm for finding BitCoin becomes more and more complicated. Unless you are mass mining it, as in invest millions, it is a waste of time.

But then I found out about all these other cryptocurrencies known as altcoins. This is not a complete list but here are the ones with the highest market caps:
https://coinmarketcap.com/all/views/all/

A more complete list of MOST cryptocurrencies out there:
http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators

So I researched them and found out the most economically viable one to mine, with my budget and for the time, would be ZCash(#17 on the 1st list) using a GTX 1080 Ti 11GB GPU. The graphics card of course being the most important part as it does all the hard work. With a GTX 1080 Ti 11GB I can mine at 650-700 hash/second. According to this, I can mine about $140 worth of Zcash/month:
https://www.cryptocompare.com/mining/calculator/zec?HashingPower=700&HashingUnit=H%2Fs&PowerConsumption=250&CostPerkWh=0.15

At today's rate that would be R1870/month. Not bad if you consider that the mining rig would 'only' cost somewhere between R19,000 and R21,000 for all the parts, with the GPU alone costing R13,500. What makes ZCash a good currency to mine is the fact that it is new. Like I mentioned with BitCoin, the algorithm for finding cryptocurrencies becomes more complicated over time. So the longer the lifespan of the currency, the harder it becomes to find. A good analogy someone made was with proper gold mining. In the beginning, the gold is easy to find on the ground and in the rivers. There is a gold rush and soon enough all the easy to find gold is gone. Suddenly you need expensive specialised equipment to dig and find it for you. Not to mention it also becomes more labour intensive.

Well, Zcash is a new currency. It is still in its gold rush phase meaning it is still easy to find. But I can make a comparison. So mining at 700 h/s, I can currently mine 0.05563 ZCoins a day. At the same speed of 700 h/s, I can only mine 3e-13 BitCoins a day. Not sure what that number is, but I know it basically means f-al. And the the worth of a ZCash coin SHOULD go up over time as they become harder to find. As happened with BitCoin and Ethereum.

It SHOULD. Therein lies the problem. At the end of the day it is just a gamble. There is no guarantee. This is what is still holding me back at the moment. R19,000 to R21,000 is a lot of money to spend. I need to do some more research and think a bit. So I did and learned that not all cryptocurrencies work the same. Ones like BitCoin and ZCash are known as Proof of Work(PoW) currencies. It is pretty much what it says. You (meaning your GPU) needs to work for it. That is why the biggest ongoing expense for PoW miners are electricity costs. GPUs use a lot of it, especially when you overclock them. But then I found out about Burst. Burst is what is known as a Proof of Capacity currency. With a PoC currency, you mine for coins using hard drive space and your CPU or GPU. Mainly your HD though. This makes it cheap to get into since I have an external with about 550GB free just lying around doing me no good anyway. Now with that amount of space, I can mine about 527 Burst/month for a grand total of $2.64!
http://burstcoin.biz/calculator

Which might also not really be true as I saw a video of a guy showing how the calculator says he should mine 93,000 Burst a month but in reality he only mined about 60,000. But this is neither here nor there. What makes Burst REALLY interesting is it's Asset Exchange. The Asset Exchange, in a nutshell, is pretty much a stock exchange. You can use your Burst to invest in an asset (ie buy shares) making you entitled to its dividends. If the asset performs well, the worth of your share in it will grow and you can then later sell it to someone for more Burst. You can then turn your Burst into cold hard cash by selling it for BitCoin on an exchange like Poloniex.com and then converting your BitCoins into whatever currency you want. You can get paid into your PayPal account or you can just open an account with Payoneer.com and have a Dollar-Pound-Euro-whatever-you-want currency account there. They even give you a bone fide VISA(or is it MasterCard?) debit card to use anywhere in the world.

Now I don't know if I will find any worth on the asset exchange for my measly 527 Burst/month but I have nothing to lose by giving it ago. I mean this is literally not costing me a cent to try. All I have to give up is some empty HD space. So I am going to start mining today and in a month I will see how accurate that calculator was. Also still need to research the asset exchange a bit. See exactly how it works and what is available.

Edit: I should also add that once I click the 'Mine' button, I am done. It requires no more effort from me. It just runs in the background as long as my PC is on and I have the miner open.

Fair enough, I do need to pay electricity, but mining from your hard drive uses a 1000th of the electricity that a GPU uses. It's negligible at best. But yeah, what I like most about this is that I do not need to risk any capital to try it out. And if I see it going somewhere, buying extra space would be WAY cheaper than buying extra GPU power. But it is that Asset Exchange that has really got me hooked.

Fawke - weirdly we on the same path again. Spent all last week looking into crypto - found it very interesting and have decided to trickle in some cash. My findings/feelings:

GPU/CPU mining - not really for me, could not really get an acceptable ROI - personally, I cannot include the 2nd hand value of the card. Of course, is sounds so appealing as it sounds like you've started a little business. But really you are in direct competition with absolutely zero advantage against some seriously clever guys with bucks to burn. Not sure even already having a card is worth it vs elec costs - you really want to be running 3-6 cards.

H/Drive: Looks fun and a way to mine with no added resources and no real costs, Not worth buying extra hardware or leaving the computer on for any long longer than you would normally. Did wipe out an unused Lynx partitian yesterday so have 400gb to plot with and a 500gb external. Will just do it for fun and to atually mine something.

Might be worth looking at nicehash.com Basically you renting out others hash power - if I was to mine would consider/give this a go.

For me, I am going to give trading altcoin a go. Will use my trading methods that I have been using - opening a Luno account now - then will give the first exchange on my list BITTREX a go. Serious volatility - should be fun.

U wanna make me cry with your reference to GTX 1080 Ti 11GB, I just bought a GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB for my online gaming and was so happy and proud how my games now look. Did not think it would be a huge improvement on my GTX 750 Ti 2 GB, but I was pleasantly surprised.

But yes, I do not know much about Bitcoin and I hope you are successful.PS. I found that Matrix has special offers in Store and you can buy it cheaper in store than online.

Sorry for only replying now. Thanks for the tip there at the end. But yeah, it's still a lot of money so I need to think about it a bit more.

@Mr_Dividend, have you ever looked into Steem? It's another up and coming cryptocurrency and it is pretty revolutionary if you ask me. Started, poorly, doing it bout a month ago but have gotten back into it the past few days. May have found a proper outlet for my writing needs

If you haven't, I would highly recommend reading up about it here:

https://steemit.com/faq.html

In a nutshell, though, it is a social networking, blogging, Facebook mashed into Reddit type of website where you mine coins by posting your photos, articles, videos, whatever to the site and then people can upvote your post if they like it. The more upvotes you get, the more coins you get. But yeah, look into it

How's the Burst mining going? I'm averaging about 100-200 coins a day. And Burst's worth has doubled vs the USD since I started

posted this on the 12th on your writer of books thread

Quote

Fawkes, take a look at steemit.com. Might be a good (and more profitable) outlet for your writing and to promote what you doing on youtube or whatever. I have been there for a week and find it a lot of fun. If you do, my user name is life-of-al, link up.

that said, seemed to have blanked out your post from the 20th may - think I had traded steem but not looked into it fully.

What's your user name? There is a steemit meet up in CT on the 8th if you interested - was thinking about going.

Lol. My apologies. Thank you for pointing me in the right direction then. I unfortunately live JHB so can't go. But look into earning your own STEEM. I do it mostly for the power of compound interest known on Steemit.com as STEEMPower. Most new coins go to SP holders and the more SP you have the more coins you get. So if you just leave it, you will get more STEEM each month as your SP grows.

And BURST has gone up another $5 to $20. Still per 1000 coins, of course. But it was at $7/1000BURST when I started a month or two ago With STEEM having doubled in value as well, it seems like I made the right choice going with those two. So far :/

My username is @SleepyPanda. Yourself?

You got yourself a follower. Would seem it is the area where you are beating me but I still got you beat on reputation