MZC is kind of crashing (lost ~70% from peak) but volume is currently low. Looks like consolidation, maybe.
Mining it has turned kinda crazy. The difficulty adjustment occurs every 4 blocks, based on the last 90 blocks. Block time is supposed to be 2 minutes. So difficulty is set based on the last 3 hours, if everything goes as planned. However, it is kind of a multi-pool situation. I don't know if it is actually a multi-pool or just a very big miner, but the network is currently sitting at 1.5PH while a few hours ago it was 150TH. It was up over 1PH earlier today, but it came back down. I think that somebody in control of a lot of hashrate is mining for a couple of hours, waiting until the difficulty gets jacked up, then going away for a couple of hours while it drifts back down. I am still mining with the same pool, but variability has gone way up. Based on some back-of-the-napkin calculations, mining MZC is still about twice as profitable as mining BTC, even with the price drop, but variance is crazy and the pool can take a very long time to find a block. So I'm not sure how long I will continue to mine it.