Newbie Here.... Does anyone know what will happen to Z9 now since ZCASH announced overwinter Hard Fork. Is my ASIC useless now. I ordered just today & seems like i am regretting it now. Can it be minted any where else Huh Sad
You should be good for at least the next few months regarding the algo change hard-forks.
Basically the overwinter hard fork was a software upgrade and they didn't do anything related to the mining algo; most likely because the ASIC release came out just recently a few months ago and they didn't want to go back a step.
If they do fork, they will do it most likely with their next release which can be months and months away.
However your enemy right now will be the other coins which fork off like Bitcoin Gold and more ASICs will turn to ZEC. Then the difficulty will keep increasing.
Another issue is we have no idea how many of these ASICs will be built in total. It could be 3x the total network hashrate at the moment. And in that case they would be unprofitable very quickly.
Basically its a risk, there is nothing risk free in life. Just get the ASIC as early as possible and mine away.