The continued interest in alternative cryptocurrencies to bitcoin is clear to see Swedish-based KnCMiner selling $2 million (£1.2m)worth of scrypt-based mining rigs in just four hours.The Titan is the company's first scrypt-based mining rig and costs $10,000, meaning the company sold 200 units in the first four hours it was available to pre-order on the website.KnCMiner saying the Titan rigs will be shipping in the second or third quarter of 2014.The company said it would make 2,500 units in the initial run but with interest in scrypt-based coins growing, KnCMiner is likely to sell out of the devices.The company also sells the Neptune bitcoin mining rig which also costs $10,000, and in December the company revealed it had sold $8 million worth of Neptune hardware in just 24 hours, claiming the Neptune rig would be able to mine 2.1 bitcoins a day - then worth over $2,000 but now worth around $1,300."Thescrypt mining market has grown over the last six months and we have been watching it very closely.

The time is now right for the launch of our new offering," the company said on its website.Bitcoin uses the SHA256 cryptographic hash function but most of the newer cryptocurrencies use the scrypt function, meaning that you can still use your GPU and CPU to mine the coins - something which is no longer really possible in bitcoin mining.Popular scrypt-based alt-coins include litecoin (the world's second most valuable cryptocurrency) and dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency.Until recently there no one was selling specially-built mining rigs for scrypt-based alt-coins as the return on investment on such coins was not at the level where people were willing to invest a lot of money in hardware like Titan.About a year ago I bought 30 Bitcoins, the online peer-to-peer crypto-currency, for about £3 each using a European website called Bitstamp.net.Bitcoins appealed to my inner crypto-anarchist and I felt they had great potential.Unlike real money, they are decentralised and transactions are free; no bank in the middle taking their slice and nothing central to fail.

Anyway, I forgot about them, and nine months on, in March this year, I saw some news about how their price was sky rocketing.I was amazed to find that my £100 investment was now worth over £2,000.This got me interested.I dived back into the crypto-coin world and started to learn everything I could about them.I also read up on things like the exponential market average crossover trading system, an age-old technique used by stock brokers.Over the next couple of months, to my astonishment, I managed to double my money.I decided to cash out at that point, by converting all my funds into Bitcoins on BTC-E and transferring them back to Bitstamp, partly because I didn't quite believe it all.But sure enough the money arrived in my bank account a few days later.However, at heart I've always been a geek and what had really grabbed my interest by then was how new Bitcoins and Litecoins are created.To find new ones you have to "mine" them, which involves a computer doing huge numbers of difficult computations.

The catch is that the more people are mining them, the harder it becomes to find new ones, so that the supply is limited.This means that they effectively have built-in deflation.So, about four weeks ago I took my £4,000 profit, added another £11,000 from my savings and set about buying and building Bitcoin and Litecoin mining hardware in my spare time.litecoin trading ukFor Bitcoins, I invested in pre-orders of new, specialised mining hardware called ASICs.jenis-jenis bitcoinFor Litecoin mining rigs, I bought lots of Graphics cards and built computers out of them in plastic crates.bitcoin mining gpu setupI also regarded this as a home R&D project for my main business, Memset.bitcoin mit sofortuberweisung

We're a hosting/data centres company and I've been keen for us to experiment with GPU-based cloud computing so I was reassured that even if it came to nothing, I could likely find a use for what I learned.Along my journey I had discovered that there were virtual securities exchanges games where one could float a virtual stock or bond quoted in crypto-currencies, and this too intrigued me.bitcoin news bitstampI decided I was going to need some help, so rounded up a few more techies, two of whom I'd met on the bitcoin forums and another two who are work colleagues.bitcoin difficulty 2009They all agreed to help me out in their spare time in exchange for shares in my planned virtual company.litecoin dollar chartNext, while on a scuba holiday between dives, I made a business model and plan for our new company, "CipherMine".poker con bitcoin

After crunching the numbers, my model was forecasting that with an extra £25,000 investment, we could be making £20,000-£30,000 per month profit from mining by the end of the year.It looked like we had a virtual business with potential.By this point, I had also come to believe that Litecoins had greater potential for growth than Bitcoins, so I eschewed the Bitcoin exchanges and instead submitted CipherMine for flotation on Litecoin Global.armory bitcoin sourceWe made our initial public offering on Monday last week.I think I probably got the IPO price a bit wrong since the 20,000 shares I listed sold out in a matter of hours.We raised a total of 15,667 Litecoins in exchange for 20% of CipherMine's shares; about £27,700 at current prices.We are in the process of investing that money into more mining hardware, but in the meantime, our share price has continued to rise.As I write this, under a week later, the shares are being actively traded at about 1.6 Litecoins each; double the IPO value.