Jump to: , Difficulty is a measure of how difficult it is to find a new block.It is a human-friendly way of expressing the target.Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Difficulty can be computed from the current target (which is a 256-bit number) as follows: Each block stores a packed representation (called "Bits") for its actual hexadecimal target.The target can be derived from it via a predefined formula.For example, if the packed target in the block is 0x1b0404cb, the hexadecimal target is Note that the 0x0404cb value is a signed value in this format.The largest legal value for this field is 0x7fffff.To make a larger value you must shift it down one full byte.Also 0x008000 is the smallest positive valid value.Difficulty 1 (which is not the lowest difficulty) corresponds to 0x1d00ffff, which gives us a hex target of There is no minimum target.The maximum difficulty is roughly: maximum_target / 1 (since 0 would result in infinity), which is a ridiculously huge number (about 2^224).

The actual maximum difficulty is when current_target=0, but we would not be able to calculate the difficulty if that happened.(fortunately it never will, so we're ok.)See discussion in target.The minimum difficulty allowed by Litecoin is 2-12, or about 0.00024414.The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks.ethereum foundationAt the desired rate of one block every 2.5 minutes, 2016 blocks would take exactly 3.5 days to find.bitcoin konto auszahlenIf the previous 2016 blocks took more than 3.5 days to find, the difficulty is reduced.bitcoin is about to explodeIf they took less than 3.5 days, the difficulty is increased.bitcoin matrix script

The change in difficulty is in proportion to the amount of time over or under 3.5 days the previous 2016 blocks took to find.To find a block, the scrypt hash must be less than the target.This hash is effectively a random number between 0 and 2**256-1.The offset for difficulty 1 is and for difficulty D is The expected number of hashes we need to calculate to find a block with difficulty D is therefore The difficulty is set such that the previous 2016 blocks would have been found at the rate of one every 2.5 minutes, so we were calculating (D * 2**48 / 0xffff) hashes in 150 seconds.bitcoin script miningThat means the hash rate of the network was over the previous 2016 blocks.mt gox and bitcoinCan be further simplified to without much loss of accuracy.At difficulty 1, that is around 28 Mhashes per second.At the time of writing, the difficulty is 1169.85315079, which means that over the previous set of 2016 blocks found the average network hash rate was The average time to find a block can be approximated by calculating: where difficulty is the current difficulty, hashrate is the number of hashes your miner calculates per second, and time is the average in seconds between the blocks you find.

For example, using Python we calculate the average time to generate a block using a 1-Mhash/s mining rig when the difficulty is 1000: and find that it would take almost 50 days on average.Litecoin is the biggest digital currency to successfully activate segwit which went live around 6PM London time on the 10th of May 2017 with segwit transactions now available for use depending on the litecoin wallet.The upgrade was overall smooth, despite a slight hiccup with one miner, F2Pool, which for a brief period returned a BTC template to LTC miners, an oversight that was quickly fixed with no known problems at the time of publishing.It is now immediately available to use if your service provider has upgraded to support segwit with Charlie Lee, Litecoin’s founder, tweeting out the first segwit transaction minutes after its activation.First SegWit transaction on Litecoin!https://t.co/QTJAMDlC8s — Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) May 10, 2017 The transaction is somewhat heavy, taking up 3KBs of space when average transactions use around 300-400 bytes.

However, Marek Palatinus, Slush Pool founder, tweeted out a segwit transaction undertaken by a Trezor hardware wallet which had an average size.The Lightning Network (LN) is now to be deployed, a second layer protocol on top of litecoin which can handle thousands of transactions per second by using the base, on-chain layer, only as a settlement for payments.Charlie Lee publicly stated there were around six LN versions working on litecoin, including from developers at MIT and Blockstream.Most of them are however at command interface levels with GUI wallets expected soon.After LN deployment, the roadmap of Bitcoin Core developers is expected to be followed.That is further capacity compression through Schnorr signatures which aggregates signature data, MAST, which aggregates scripts, and other optimizations mainly focused on complex multisignature transactions to support layer two protocols.The upgrade has generally been uncontroversial in the litecoin community and seemingly overwhelmingly supported by litecoin users.

After some public debate between miners and developers, they all agreed to upgrade the network on the condition that on-chain capacity would be increased if blocks reach 50% capacity.Soon after that agreement, segwit was locked in two weeks ago with almost all of the hashrate support, turning the upgrade into a flag-day event.In anticipation, price increased by 40% yesterday, from around $22 to a high of $38.Once segwit was activated, price fell to a low of $28, somewhat stabilizing today at around $32.That’s after rising from around $4 two months ago once the segwit activation process began.The upgrade has gained the attention of the bitcoin community due to their own scalability debate which remains unresolved after two years.Litecoin hopes to show them how LN works in practice, but whether that will make any difference remains to be seen.So you've heard about Litecoin mining and you want to find out more.This page is for you.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.Litecoin 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.If you have decided to do some CPU mining (just for the fun of it, since as we've seen above you are not going to make any profit), you should download Pooler's cpuminer.