Litecoin continues to rise in popularity, as one of the leading mining manufacturers lists new litecoin hardware on its website.Bitmain, based in China, recently listed the Antminer L3+ miner online, with manufacturing and shipping to be completed in July.With prices starting at $1370, the company claims that it is one of the most powerful and efficient litecoin compatible miners on the market, operating at a peak hash rate of 504 MH’s (megahashes per second) and consuming 1.6 J/MH (Joules per megahash).This and other new developments in mining hardware are further strengthening litecoin’s position following a surge of interest in the past two weeks.Miners have been showing support for the proposed software update – SegWit – that if confirmed will improve the network’s potential to efficiently process transactions quicker than leading cryptocurrency Bitcoin.The price of a single litecoin shot to almost $12 on Wednesday 12th April, an increase of 20% from the previous day, and nearly a three-year high after it spent years languishing behind bitcoin and its other large rival, Ethereum.

Support for the software upgrade was rapidly approaching the 75% threshold required for the process to take effect at the end of last week.According to Charles Hayter, CEO of CryptoCompare, litecoin has achieved what bitcoin and ethereum have both failed to do: “it has managed to break through an impasse by offering a scaling solution.” SegWit will enable miners to process more coins into each litecoin blockchain by stripping out data from litecoin transactions.noble markets bitcoinFor buyers this means increased ease transferring the balance from one litecoin to another, an ‘off-chain’ transaction that isn’t processed by the primary litecoin network, causing a reduction in fees.bitcoin loi franceDespite a recent attempt ethereum didn’t quite reach the consensus required to split its network into two separate coins, a fate that bitcoin also shared in March.litecoin value graph 2013

As long as litecoin remains scalable, it has been discussed that it could gain market share from bitcoin due to the two currencies sharing similarities in their codebases.Petar Zivkovski, director of trading platform Whaleclub’s COO, has stated that “SegWit activation is very likely to create a mid-term bullish trend which will increase litecoin’s market cap.” However, he firmly believes that what is good for litecoin will also be good for bitcoin due to “some amount of wealth transfer from bitcoin to litecoin, simply because the most convenient way to buy litecoin is to use bitcoin.” Although it is rapidly being accepted and utilized by global brands and online retailers, cryptocurrency is yet to be fully embraced by one of the largest growing online industries, namely the Casino industry.bitcoin growth fund redditPokerStars, one of the leading online platforms in the industry, is one such company that hasn’t integrated litecoin or any of its rivals, stating as yet that it is not on their ‘roadmap.’ Although there are numerous online platforms offering casino-based games that do accept bitcoin, partnering with the leaders in the industry must surely be the way forward to secure the future of cryptocurrency in the market.220 million bitcoin

And for now at least miner manufacturers like Bitmain aren’t committing themselves to allocating significant resources to litecoin hardware, despite SegWit-related support from mining pools like China’s F2Pool, due to the very simple fact that litecoin is still only worth a fraction of the market value of bitcoin.Header image courtesy of FlickrYep There’s Gold In Them There AlgorithmsOver the last year I have had countless people in the tech world ask about the mining of algorithmic currency.bitcoin mbtcThese last months the interest has reached a level that is quite amazing.In one of the last meetings of the algorithmic currency “rocket scientists” group ( a mastermind group), the dozens of people on the call brought in by two Silicon Valley VCs asked quite a number of questions about the details of algorithmic currency mining and the details of mining rigs.Most of the people on the call have seen specialized ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) Bitcoin Miners.

However, few understood the way Litecoin was mined and what the miners look like.At one point Bitcoin could be profitably mined on a computer’s CPU and later on using the Graphic’s card (GPU) on the computer but the specific way Bitcoin is mined tilted to the development of ASIC designed specifically for Bitcoin mining.Litecoin was designed to limit the usefulness of ASICs.There are a few ways ASICs could increase the productivity of Litecoin mining but there are technical limits.The creators of Litecoin saw the Bitcoin mining community was in what is called the “arms race” to find faster and faster mining rigs.This has the prospect of overly centralizing mining and Bitcoin confirmations into a smaller group then the apparent intention of the Bitcoin creators.Thus Litecoin has tried to address this issue by making the mining of Litecoin profitable enough for smaller operators.I might add that Bitcoin has once again become very profitable to mine for a smaller operation with the right ASICs as the price reaches above the conversion into $1,000.

Just about all of the algorithmic currencies that are not Bitcoin are based on the Litecoin model.The Coins Are In The ScryptLitecoin is in the place that Bitcoin was about 14 months ago.Thus I am not surprised that during the last call with these VCs there was a tremendous amount of questions about exactly Litecoin is mined.Most miners work in groups called pools and share the hashing and share the resulting coins that are mined.It sounds far more complex then it is in practicality as the software and pooled mining sites do most of the work.The Hillbilly Litecoin Mining RigThe mining programs are usually run as stand alone process on Linux, PCs and some Macs.The work that Litecoin Scrypt mining puts on the GPUs will result in heat and thus Laptop mining is not a great idea unless the laptop can be very cool and watched closely for the potential of thermal damage.For quite a few years I used an old Macbook for mining Bitcoin and never had any issues.A serious mining operation should have serious equipment.

In the case of the current state of the art in Litecoin mining this is the MSI and Gigabyte 7950, Sapphire Vapor-X video cards.These cards are “tuned” in the software to run as fast as possible without overheating.It is much like building a nitro hotrod.This of course generates a great deal of heat and the only practical way to work with this is to create an open case that quickly allows for thermal dissipation.This makes Litecoin mining rigs look like a mixup of a computer parts truck hitting a milk truck.Many of us will use a “Milk Crate” to contain all of the parts and many have come to lovingly call these systems “Hillbilly Mining” rigs for their quite distinctive appearance.I get a pass using Hillbilly also as there is some fine Hillbilly linage in me by way of Newark, New Jersey.Specimen of a Sapphire Vapor-X based Ubuntu operating system Hillbilly mining rig.I tend to like the Cobalt Blue milk crates as they bring out the blue glows of the Sapphire X cards, a beautiful sight in a room with a view of the setting sun.

This rig can run at about 2000 KH/sec (Kilo Hashes) and will sound quite slow in comparison to ASIC Bitcoin miners that are reaching past 2 TH/sec.However this little guy can dig up about $40 per day (minus ~$1.03 in electric) at current rates of Litecoin to Bitcoin/US Dollars with pooled mining.Thus a simple Hillbilly mining operation could yield a conservative $14,600 per year if little happens to the price of Litecoin and the difficulty changes follow the current path.Mining is quite entertaining and a great way to learn the deep intricacies of electronics.Many of my friends in tech and many VCs know either how to code or have a reasonable good idea of the processes involved.These days it is not very common to find people that understand what is really going on in the hardware they code for.Mining for algorithmic currency makes you come face to face with the very essence of the hardware and it is quite liberating.The Gold Rush Of The Early 2010’sWith all algorithmic currency, even after the last coin is mined, these mining rigs will still be needed to confirm transactions and income will be generated via transaction fees encoded into the blocks.

Thus mining will be around as long as people want to trade algorithmic currency.And perhaps quite a number of miners will stay far longer then the Gold Rush of the 1800’s.Mining may become generational.Like any gold rush, and this is about as close as our epoch has come to the classic 1890’s California gold rush, there are all sort of businesses and interesting people that have materialized.This creates a very colorful environment that is not unlike the old gold rush towns.Today’s stake claims are in the pre orders of ever more powerful ASIC mining rigs for Bitcoin.Bitcoin is quickly becoming very much like the corporate mining that took over the better mining operations in the late 1890s in California.With Litcoin there will always be a wildcat mining culture to some degree and pools of miners working to find the next nugget.These miners assemble from around the world, working a claim and working for their new “American Dream”.The past is prologue.Image of the alliance of miners working a claim in the late 1800’s._______[1] scrypt - Litecoin WikiIt can be, but it also could not be.