The era of Bitcoin mining on the GPU is dead.A year ago, a single Radeon graphics card could crank out a reasonable fraction of a Bitcoin in a single day.Today, that same GPU earns a thousandth of a Bitcoin in 24 hours, generating little value while consuming a substantial amount of power.The shift to ASICs for Bitcoin mining mirrors the shift from CPUs to GPUs, but the market isn’t content to just turn those mining rigs off — not when there’s an alternative currency available for which ASIC miners do not exist.That alternative is Litecoin — and there’s reason to think that buyers have emptied the shelves of AMD’s Radeon hardware to build mining platforms.First off, there’s the fact that you can’t find a high-end Radeon in stock at the moment.Newegg and Amazon are both out of stock, while over at Amazon, the lowly AMD Sempron 145 — a single-core, 2.8GHz chip with a $29.75 price — is the 5th most popular CPU.Further proof of this trend is the Litecoin network hash rate, is shown here:Clearly Litecoin miners are coming online, and they’re coming online en masse.

Many of these are undoubtedly Bitcoin miners switching over now that GPUs are no longer cost effective, but some of these systems are probably driven by new miners.Litecoin, like Bitcoin, is a cryptocurrency, but it’s based on scrypt, not SHA-256.bitcoin ticker alertScrypt is a different cryptographic algorithm that’s purposefully designed to be difficult to parallelize.i7 bitcoin minerWhile that hasn’t stopped it from moving to the GPU, it requires far more memory than Bitcoin mining — several gigabytes worth, as opposed to several dozen megabytes.Litecoin confirms transactions faster (every 2.5 minutes, rather than every 10 minutes for Bitcoin) and it contains more coins — 84 million coins will be found in total under the LTC protocol, as opposed to 21 million for BTC.bitcoin com boleto

Bitcoin and Litecoin prices tend to move together; Bitcoins stratospheric leap over the past month (it’s down from a high of $1200 but trading at $873 as of this writing) has created an odd situation where it’s easier to mine Litecoin and then convert LTC to BTC then it is to just mine BTC to start with.Nvidia users may also take note — the gap between Nvidia and AMD cards in Litecoin mining is slightly smaller than with Bitcoin, with the GTX 770 capable of up to 240 KHash/s (yes, we’re back to KHash, from MHash) as compared to about 880 KHash/s for the R9 290X.ethereum miner power supplyThat’s still a significant gap, but it’s better than the BTC situation, where the 680 hit just 130 MHash compared to the R9 290X’s 874MHash/s.My philosophy on mining cryptocurrencies hasn’t changed since I first heard about Bitcoin in 2011.uk bitcoin vat

If you want to make a bit of a play at earning a little scratch, go for it.ireland bitcoin regulationDefinitely go for it if you already own the hardware.btc bitcoin kursIf you think mining some coins could help defray the costs of buying a new GPU that you’re going to use anyway, then that’s probably a reasonable bet.Understand, however, the operative word is bet.bitcoin wert liveIn the two years I’ve been mining, I’ve gone through three pools.bitcoin euro kurs chartOne became too small to sustain itself, one was DDOS’d to death, and 50BTC technically claims to still be operating, but its account system has been screwed up for nearly two months and the support staff no longer answer emails.

Its FAQ on the attack hasn’t been updated in weeks.All withdrawals are frozen.Jumping into this scene, therefore, isn’t something I recommend doing on a lark, and I definitely don’t recommend investing thousands in building huge server farms to try and cash in on Litecoin.Yes, if you mined hundreds of Bitcoins between 2011 and the present day, you may have just settled your retirement — but the chances of predicting an essentially unpredictable market are too high.Don’t risk money you can’t afford to lose.A tip of the hat to reader Justin Jaynes at Seeking Alpha, who alerted me to the sudden Radeon shortage and the LTC shift.Now read: Bitcoin breaks $1000, but how far can it go?- Let us mine for you with our hardware in the cloud - Immediate results, mining updates every 60 seconds - Can own fractions of cloud instances, if desired - No heat or hardware to maintain - Choose payout in any displayed cryptocurrency - 5 year and 24 hour rental lengths available - No returns/exchanges - (Cloud SHA-256) SHA-256 algorithm, 1.0 GHS per 1.0 cloud instance owned - (Cloud SHA-256) Follows Bitcoin difficulty, which in the past has increased exponentially.

This means payouts will likely be reduced over time, unless the price of Bitcoin rises to keep pace - (Cloud Scrypt) Scrypt algorithm, 1.0 MHS per 1.0 cloud instance owned - (Cloud Scrypt) Follows Litecoin difficulty, which in the past has increased exponentially.This means payouts will likely be reduced over time, unless the price of Litecoin rises to keep pace - For electricity and maintenance, we take a fee.Please click here for information on the fee.Purchase PriceMonthly Mining Payouts*Mining Break-Even Months* USD$0.320$0.020215.84 BTC0.0001 BTC0.0000 BTC15.84 ETH0.0010 ETH0.0001 ETH15.84 LTC0.0071 LTC0.0004 LTC15.84 STEEM0.1425 STEEM0.0090 STEEM15.84 DOGE108.0433 DOGE6.8202 DOGE15.84 XRP1.0833 XRP0.0684 XRP15.84 DASH0.0017 DASH0.0001 DASH15.84 GNT0.4936 GNT0.0312 GNT15.84 BTS1.0352 BTS0.0653 BTS15.84 CURE1.5953 CURE0.1007 CURE15.84 XEM1.6518 XEM0.1043 XEM15.84 XMR0.0063 XMR0.0004 XMR15.84 ZEC0.0009 ZEC0.0001 ZEC15.84 FCT0.0096 FCT0.0006 FCT15.84 BCN167.3147 BCN10.5617 BCN15.84 REP0.0104 REP0.0007 REP15.84 LSK0.0944 LSK0.0060 LSK15.84 MAID0.5812 MAID0.0367 MAID15.84 USD0.3200 USD0.0202 USD15.84 GRC3.7543 GRC0.2370 GRC15.84 *Cloud mining should be considered as a fun, recreational activity and not a source of income or investment.