But, this does bring us to one of the important design considerations in mazacoin. Maza is a sha256 coin, and as such, it's design it to help older mining gear find new, profitable homes as it becomes to small to mine bitcoin in a meaningful way. We're starting to see the first generation of sha256 asics become much less profitable now. My own team is likely to repurpose our own 55nm gear as home heating units. We believe there are ways that we can use this shift in the mining market to put more gear on the reservations. Of course, this will take time to secure gear, and put distribution in place. We want to ensure that this is not any kind of a handout, but provides real skill building opportunities. The mazacoin development team is committed to putting mazacoin into the hands and control of the people it serves.
I am a longtime supporter of Mazacoin and I want to see more of the indigenous peoples around the world take direct action to lift themselves out of poverty.
I have been collecting theses coins for many months and I do not care if I don't get rich from it.. Just as long as I see it improve the lives of the lakota peoples.
with that being said.. the above statement seems to have been not very well thought out.
I have a generation 1 Butterfly labs ASIC miner.. it still works fine, I did mine MZC for a short time but currently I do not use it for mining because it simply isn't profitable anymore.. not even to mine smaller coins like MZC.
The idea of using old ASICs as space heaters seems like a great one and I tried to use mine to heat up my room this winter... the problem was that it creates way too much noise for it to be practical.
so the reality faced by the idea of using gen1 (or 2) ASICs as space heaters is:
A) the ROI is virtually non existent. you are unlikely to ever get your money back from mining Sha256 even if you buy cheap secondhand asics. so it is more economical just buy the coins outright.
B) asic draw too much electricity and create too much noise for them to be a practical means of heating up a room/small house.
I think that if Mazacoin remains sha256 it will always be vulnerable to multipool and 51% abuses.. much more so than coins of a similar size that are not sha256 based.