I've been following Syscoin for about a year now. I've resorted to buying the currency through exchanges and wondered if the platform had moved to a PoS/Masternode-only block reward. They have not. You can still mine Syscoin today and you can still mine it while mining other cryptocurrencies without impacting the hashrate performance of the "primary" coin being mined.
Over the past year, I've tried to figure out how to mine Syscoin and failed on many occasions. I never seemed to be able to find a mining pool that supported Syscoin. According to the documentation available, Syscoin can be "Merge Mined". Merged mining has to be supported by the mining pool. This may have been more common in past, but is not commonly supported by the mining pools I use primarily and unfortunately, most of the mining pools that are listed as supporting merged mining Syscoin are no longer in service. I imagine there must be a significant demand for mining Syscoin (SYS) if the means of doing so was more transparent. Syscoin is severely under-rated and undervalued cryptocurrency with an underutilized feature rich platform. I'll spare you my fanboy rant. What we want to know is how to mine or merge-mine Syscoin in 2018 and beyond.
Merge Mining Syscoin in 2018
I'll spare you the details of the hunt. In 2018, you can merge mine Syscoin (SYS), Namecoin (NMC), and Emercoin (EMC) while mining BTC or BCH (sha-256 currencies) as well as LTC (Scrypt) on ViaBTC Use this link to sign-up. There's no trade-off on the payout of the coin you are mining and it appears to support merged mining with Dash. All you have to do is sign-up using the link above, point your miners to the URLs provided (your username is used rather than a wallet address) and Syscoin is mined automatically.
In the screenshot below, I've just begun mining BTC, LTC, and X11. Ethereum (ETH) and ZCash (ZEC) are also supported.
So far, this is the best option I've found found merge mining Syscoin in 2018. If you are aware of other options please let me know in the comments.
Update
According to this post on reddit, the merged mining payouts on ViaBTC beginning May 20th of 2018 are:
BTC: Mine 1 BTC Get 2 NMC, 5 SYS & 0.2 EMC
BCH: Mine 1 BCH Get 1 SYS
LTC: Mine 1 LTC Get 800 DOGE
Legacy Pools
I did find a very cool legacy mining pool at mmpool.org which supported merged mining Syscoin, namecoin, i0coin, ixcoin, devcoin, and unobtanium. I was unfamiliar with several of these cryptocurrencies, but found that most were worth looking into.
Ultimately, I found this venue (mmpool.org) impractical for my needs as it appeared there was only one other active user and would take several months to achieve a reward due to the pool's low hashrate.