PC gaming GPU giants Nvidia and AMD are lining up cheaper, stripped-down crypto-specific graphics cards in the face of overwhelming demand led by Bitcoin & Ethereum miners.As bitcoin increasingly finds itself under the mainstream’s eye amid an ongoing price boom, there is a distinct shortage of graphics cards in the gaming market.According to AMD, whose GPUs are currently sold-out at major US retailers, the blame is on a “solid demand” by “newly resurgent cryptocurrency mining markets.” Nvidia-based graphics cards, traditionally more expensive than AMD GPUs, are also seeing an increase in demand.The gaming market remains the priority for the two hardware manufacturers who have seen a similar market swell in demand for graphics cards in late 2013 from Bitcoin and Litecoin miners.This time, AMD & Nvidia are addressing gamers’ frustration and new miners’ demands head on.According to a report by Digitimes, both Nvidia and AMD are both preparing to release GPUs specifically designed for bitcoin mining at reduced costs due to lower specifications compared to their gaming GPU cousins.

What’s being stripped away?Details are scarce, but the manufacturers are removing HDMI and/or Display ports as image outputs from the mining-specific hardware.They will also come with reduced 90-day warranty periods due to the intensive 24-hour operation that the bitcoin mining GPUs are likely to see.The report from the Asian publication also reveals a name for Nvidia’s model, the GeForce GTX1060-100.There are no details about the new hardware on Nvidia’s website at the time of publishing.AMD is reportedly redesigning its entry-level 400 series hardware for cryptocurrency-miners.Both manufacturers’ GPUs are expected to be available by the end of this month, June.GPUs based on the higher-end 500 series, the Radeon Rx 580 and Rx 570 are sold out, as reported by CCN yesterday.Another factor cited by the report as a reason for a new line of bitcoin-mining GPUs is the aftermarket costs incurred by vendors during the mining boom of 2013.After the bitcoin mining trend tailed off soon after, an entire slew of miners sold their heavily-used graphics cards to the second-hand market.

These cards remained under warranty and, as a result, their vendors and manufacturers saw significant maintenance-related costs in prepping up the GPUs for their second-hand owners.litecoin price poundsThis would explain AMD & Nvidia lowering the warranty period for the new mining-specific hardware to a measly 90 days.ethereum front endOther hardware manufacturers are also looking to capitalize on the surging demand, with some motherboard vendors reportedly pushing their products specifically designed for Bitcoin mining.bitcoin wiki frSo you've heard about Litecoin mining and you want to find out more.bitcoin android nfcThis page is for you.bitcoin two way atm

See the Litecoin Association's introductory video to Litecoin.Just like its older brother Bitcoin, Litecoin is an online network that people can use to send payments from one person to another.bitcoin pool urlLitecoin is peer-to-peer and decentralized, meaning that it is not controlled by any single entity or government.The payment system does not handle physical currencies, like the dollar or the euro; instead, it uses its own unit of account, which is also called litecoin (symbol: Ł or LTC).This is why you will often see Litecoin categorized as a virtual or digital currency.Litecoins can be bought and sold for traditional money at a variety of exchanges available online.If you already know Bitcoin, Litecoin is very similar, the two main differences being that it has faster confirmation times and it uses a different hashing algorithm.Instead of having one central authority that secures and controls the money supply (like most governments do for their national currencies), Litecoin spreads this work across a network of “miners”.

Miners assemble all new transactions appearing on the Litecoin network into large bundles called blocks, which collectively constitute an authoritative record of all transactions ever made, the blockchain.The way Litecoin makes sure there is only one blockchain is by making blocks really hard to produce.So instead of just being able to make blocks at will, miners have to produce a cryptographic hash of the block that meets certain criteria, and the only way to find one is to try computing many of them until you get lucky and find one that works.This process is referred to as hashing.The miner that successfully creates a block is rewarded with 25 freshly minted litecoins.Every few days, the difficulty of the criteria for the hash is adjusted based on how frequently blocks are appearing, so more competition between miners equals more work needed to find a block.This network difficulty, so called because it is the same for all miners, can be quantified by a number; right now, it is 255,206.

Litecoin mining can be profitable, but only under certain conditions.In the early days people could make a profit by mining with their CPUs and GPUs, but that is no more the case today.The introduction of specialized mining hardware (commonly referred to as ASICs), which can mine much faster and much more efficiently, has made finding blocks much harder with general-purpose hardware.If you compare the profitability analyses for a CPU, a GPU and an ASIC, you will see that the costs of CPU and GPU mining largely exceed the rewards, and even with free electricity the profits are so small that they are hardly worth the effort.Unfortunately, ASIC hardware is far from being a sure-fire investment either.Potential buyers should be extremely careful, as various elements should be considered: Most importantly: always do your own research, and never trust any single source of information.Good starting points are LitecoinTalk.io and the /r/litecoin and /r/litecoinmining subreddits.

Don't feel like investing in expensive hardware?Not everyone needs to be a miner.In fact, the easiest way to get started with Litecoin is to buy some at an exchange.As we've seen above, finding a block is very hard.Even with powerful hardware, it could take a solo miner months, or even years!This is why mining pools were invented: by sharing their processing power, miners can find blocks much faster.Pool users earn shares by submitting valid proofs of work, and are then rewarded according to the amount of work they contributed to solving a block.The reward systems used by mining pools can be roughly subdivided into two categories: proportional systems and pay-per-share systems.Choosing a mining pool can be a very personal decision, and several factors should be taken into consideration, including features, reliability, reputability, and user support.ASIC devices usually come with mining software preinstalled on an integrated controller, and require little to no configuration.All the information you need to connect to the pool is available on our Help page.