I've been mining a couple crypto-currencies for a little while now and I've been exploring different websites and mining pools. One that has become very interesting is Minergate.com.
Minergate built a console that you can download from their site which acts as a wallet and miner. You can mine the following coins using their mining console: AEON, BCN, DSH, ETC, ETH, FCN INF8, MCN, QCN, XDN, and XMR. However, if you are computer savvy and can build your own mining rig, or are even able to just operate a separate miner using the command prompt on Windows or Linux (rarely Mac OS), you'll be able to mine coins such as LTC, BTC, and ZEC. Obviously it won't be very profitable to mine LTC or BTC with out ASICs miners. But You can mine Zcash very easily as long as you have a GPU available. You'll also be able to mine directly to your Minergate account through the Minergate pool.
The main issue that I ran into while mining ZEC was that I was not being paid out regularly. One day I received 0.09 ZEC for a day of mining and then for the next 3 days I didn't get a single payout. Then on the 4th day I received a payout of 0.07 ZEC.
I went to the site's chat several times to ask administrators as well as users what their experience with Zcash was. Nobody responded. After a while I started to get annoyed. Mainly because I was having issues connecting to any other pool. I felt like Minergate was not being transparent with their payouts and not giving you a good idea of what your mining status is. Their dashboard is rarely ever correct with respect to how much you've been mining. Finally, I asked in all caps, "WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH ZCASH AND MINERGATE?" One chat administrator finally responded - not with anything related to my question but instead asking me to refrain from using all caps in the site's chat. So I continued my conversation stating that I'd been asking for several days and that nobody as responding. The administrator insisted that it was because nobody had an answer to my inquiry. To which I responded that this was a bunch of non-sense and that Minergate should be more transparent and more responsive. Finally, I told the administrator that I would be forced to speak ill of Minergate in forums if I couldn't get a response or any proper payouts. This resulted in an immediate ban from the site. Not like a short suspension but a 30 YEAR BAN.
To be fair, I doubt Minergate will be around for the next 30 years so I'm not too hurt by it. Would a website ban you for 30 years for asking questions if they didn't have anything to hide? I don't think so. I'm also getting exponentially larger payouts from Flypool (a much better pool in my opinion). Flypool shows you how your machine(s) operates over time. And they show you details of payouts and projected income based on the performance of your miners over specific periods of time. Every pool basically pays out based on how many shares your miners put into the network before the pool mines a block collectively. "After the slow-start period, 12.5 ZEC will be mined per block. Each 4 year period (or 840,000 mined blocks), the ZEC creation amount will halve (from 12.5 to 6.25 to 3.125 to 1.5625 and so on)." (That was directly from the ZCash FAQ page.) The payout of a mined block is distributed among the miners in the pool and everyone is happy. Unless you use Minergate's pool, in which case you will have no idea when you are being paid out, how much, or based on what number of shares. Nanopool is another great pool that I was using for a while, very comparable to Flypool but I think I am getting a slightly quicker payout from Flypool.
Nobody knows how much of their actual hashing power is going to the Minergate pool or how much they are registering to your address. My miner was working at a rate of approximately 1.4 kSol/s, in which Sols are the equivalent metric for hashrates within the ZEC network. However, on the Minergate website I was never achieving even half of that number in their dashboard. I hit a max of 800 Sol/s once for a few minutes maybe.
My theory is that Minergate is not COMPLETE bullshit. You are definitely getting paid a percentage of the coins that they claim you are mining in their pools - there is no doubt about that because my wallet has coins in it. The doubt is that Minergate is acting ethically with respect to their pooling features. If you are only getting registered at half the hashing rate that you are actually putting out - what is happening to that other half? I truly believe that the people working at Minergate are keeping a lot of your hashing power and, in effect, a lot of the tokens mined in their pools all for themselves. This is actually sort of like embezzlement. Even if they only tool 10 Sol/s off of my hashing rate, over a long period of time, that would probably come out to a lot of coins.
Over a one year period, they would be making $42 USD or 0.1122 ZEC at the current rates. Multiply that by thousands of users and now you are looking at a very substantial amount of money - especially if ZEC and other currencies continue to rise as much as they have recently. And there is really no law that can enforce transparency. The Crypto-world is pretty lawless at this point. If you are familiar with the hack of the DAO and the reaction of the Ethereum network, you will notice that crypto-geniuses care less about emotions and human ethics than a program that works correctly as it was written, even if the code has a flaw that can cost people millions of dollars.
In conclusion, I'm still mining - I like to live dangerously lol (it's really not dangerous). I don't live dangerously enough to keep my coins on an exchange considering all the hacks of exchanges in the last 2 years. And as promised, I'm here in blogs and forums, talking smack about Minergate because nobody would answer my stimple questions. And I'm banned from Minergate for 30 years lol but like I said I doubt they'll be around for that long, especially when Crypto sees some true legislation and law enforcement getting involved in their world.