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.Scrypt is a different cryptographic algorithm that’s purposefully designed to be difficult to parallelize.While 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.litecoin trading tipsBitcoin 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.bitcoin gbp preev

That’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.If you want to make a bit of a play at earning a little scratch, go for it.Definitely go for it if you already own the hardware.If 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 nyu polyIn the two years I’ve been mining, I’ve gone through three pools.bitcoin kurs 2010One 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.bitcoin at cvs

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.bitcoin ticker apiDon’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?Mining Ethereum can be done in a variety of ways - you can buy a cloud contract  and get someone else to do all the hard work for you, or you can do it yourself and get your GPU, or Graphics Card, up and running.

However the efficiency of your graphics card can vary a lot and picking one can be quite difficult.What we have done is make the process easier for you by picking a handful of suppliers and showing you how to choose which GPU mines the most and which GPU is the best value for money.Each Graphics card will mine slightly differently depending on the way it is made.This is all about how each GPU runs the ETHASH algorithm which is key to the proof of work in Ethereum.They also use different amounts of power.You can sort on our mining equipment pages by filtering out bitcoin equipment and find the best GPU for you to mine ethereum with.To make it easy we have taken a selection of Ethereum mining GPU's and taken their average stats and metrics from our live ethereum exchange rates and mining network data.This allows us to get key data on how good the graphics card is - like how many days it will take to payoff you buying it and how much ether it should return per year.We also show second hand refurbished graphics cards that are generally cheaper and have a better return because of the cost price.

Once you have selected your GPU depending on your budget or whether you want it to mine efficiently or whether you just want the highest amount of mega hashes - then you can click through to find more return information on it.We show you how much the return per day exceeds the cost of running it with our profit ratio metric, and show you how much you would expect to make in a year given a stable network hash rate and exchange rate.Its not the graphics card that has the highest number of mega hashes, or the graphics card that is the most power efficient - it's a balance of what works for you.A word of warning though is that Ethereum will move from proof of work to proof of stake - and nobody knows when this will happen because it depends on the development community.Also bear in mind that the GPU or graphics card that you choose to mine Ethereum with needs to fit in your computer or have a special computer built for it - this will depend on a lot of other factors such as whether your computer has enough power to add an extra graphics card in or whether your computer's motherboard has the correct slot to take the card.