Wondering what sha256 coin is worth mining right now.
Gonna bump this because I was wondering the same thing. I don't think it's worth it to mine bitcoin on my sha256 miner at this moment, so what's a coin I can mine which I can easily convert into bitcoin on poloniex?
You could always try CoinWarz to find the most profitable coin for your hardware:
http://www.coinwarz.com/Right now, it seems that
Digitalcoin Mazacoin Peercoin might be the most profitable SHA-256 coin to mine. Keep in mind however that the most profitable coin can change at any given moment since mining difficulties and exchange rates are constantly changing. A coin that might be the most profitable to mine right now could drop to 10th place or so in a matter of minutes.
Personally, I'd just stick with Bitcoin. If you mine Bitcoin then you can also choose to merge mine with Namecoin (or Ixcoin, or I0coin, or Devcoin...) if you want and if your pool supports it. Then you can convert these into BTC. Most exchanges support NMC. The extra amount you'd get compared with mining BTC only is pretty small but hey, it's free.
If you want to go through the speculative route then you could try finding a coin that is still fairly new and hasn't been listed on an exchange yet. Mining would be the only way to obtain these coins and you'd be hoping for their value to shoot up once they hit an exchange. Those who mined Dogecoin back when it was new made enormous profits, for example. New SHA-256 coins are rare these days but there are still a few new ones being launched every month. According to
Altcoincalendar.info, new SHA-256 coins launched this month include the likes of Coronaz, Cryptotarget, and GoodLuckCoin. Jetcoin is another SHA-256 coin that will be launched later this month.