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.deep web bitcoin walletThe 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.bitcoin bodenIf 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.bitcoin wallet white labelUnfortunately, 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.GPU mining is considerably harder to set up, and not much more efficient than CPU mining when compared to ASICs.Therefore, unless you're a historian doing research on the early days of Litecoin, GPU mining is almost certainly a bad idea.Jump to: , A statistically valid analysis of some pools and their payout methods: Bitcoin network and pool analysis The following pools are known or strongly suspected to be mining on top of blocks before fully validating them with Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 or later.Miners doing this have already lost over $50,000 USD during the 4 July 2015 fork and have created a situation where small numbers of confirmations are much less useful than they normally are.

The following pools are believed to be currently fully validating blocks with Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 or later (0.10.2 or later recommended due to DoS vulnerabilities):Mining pool comparison Jump to: navigation, search This page lists all known mining pools along with many of the important details needed to choose a Litecoin pool which best suits you.It is usually a requirement to register an account on the pool, and configure your workers on the pool's portal account pages before mining.Each pool may have different payment methods--select the method which works best for you.A frequently updated list of each pool's hashrates.If possible, please help the network by mining with a pool that doesn't have a large part of the network hashrate.Contents 1 2 3 4 5 "Green" pools are more likely to have active webmasters and be more responsive to the needs of their miners.Name - The name of the pool and the pool's URL.Reward - See Reward types.Fee % - The percentage that the pool charges as a fee.

Launched - The launch date of the pool.Forum - The pool's forum announcement and usually its general public support and info thread.Must be a 3rd party site.Location - The geographical locations of the pool's servers.VDF - Vardiff, short for "variable-difficulty", optimizes the difficulty based on your worker's capacity.Does the pool have vardiff?STX - Blocks are not always 50 LTC because they can contain transaction fees.Does the pool share transaction fees with the miners?LB - Load balancing helps maintain uptime in case a server goes down.Does the pool have multiple mining servers?SSL - SSL is an encryption protocol that protects your privacy.Does the pool have SSL on the main website?TLS - Does the pool support TLS encryption for Stratum connections (prevents hijacking of mining connections)?The list is sorted by the date the pool was announced (Launched)--clicking a column header will change the sort method.Name Reward Fee % Launch Forum Location VDF STX LB SSL TLS Coinotron PPS/RBPPS/PPLNS 6/4.5/1.5 2011-10-20 Link PL No No No Yes No PPS 4 2011-11-05 Link UK, US-NY, US-CA, TOR Yes N/A Yes Yes Yes GiveMeCoins PPLNS 0 2013-03-11 Link US-AZ, FR Yes Yes Yes Yes No TBDice PPLNS (Solo) 0.5 2014-12-28 Link US Yes Yes ?

No No It is recommended not to use mining pools which have a large part of the total network hash rate.The site Learn Cryptography has more information behind the risks of having pools grow to a size of 51% or more of the total network.Think of it this way, what made you decide to join one of these big pools?Was it because bigger is better?For mining, bigger doesn't mean it's better.Joining a bigger pool does not mean bigger or faster payouts, especially when the payment system is probably the same one used by nearly every other pool (PPLNS).Maybe because the big pools are established and trusted?Many of the large pools were created during the Litecoin rush of April 2013.There are numerous smaller pools that were created at the same time or earlier.You can take a look at The Litecoin hash rate distribution chart and avoid joining the biggest pools.Or if you are currently mining them, please Spread the Hashes and consider switching to a pool with a smaller percentage of the total network.

CPPSRB - Capped Pay Per Share with Recent Backpay is a calculation that provides the maximum payout without bankrupting the pool.[1]DGM - Double Geometric Method.A hybrid between PPLNS and Geometric reward types that enables to operator to absorb some of the variance risk.Operator receives portion of payout on short rounds and returns it on longer rounds to normalize payments.POT - Pay On Target.High variance reward system to those that like a gamble.You get more for shares of higher difficulty, meaning you get a big reward if you're the block finder.PPLNS - Pay Per Last N Shares.Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, it looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.PPS - Pay Per Share.Each submitted share is worth a certain amount of Litecoin.It is risky for pool operators, hence the fee is highest.When a block is found, the reward is distributed among all workers proportionally to how many shares each of them has found.RBPPS - Round-Based Pay Per Share.

Like PPS, but payouts are delayed until a block is found and confirmed by the network.If a found block gets orphaned, earnings relative to it are not paid.There is no "normal" or "standard" or "base" difficulty for Litecoin pools.Difficulty is measured in the same way as Bitcoin difficulty, but since the hashing algorithm used by Litecoin is much more complex (and therefore slower), pools need to use a share difficulty lower than 1.In the first months after the launch of Litecoin, most pools used a share difficulty of 2-16 or 2-15.They could have used even lower values, but there was no point in doing that.After GPU mining became widespread, most pools moved to higher difficulties, such as 2-12.The reason behind this was to decrease bandwidth usage, as a higher share difficulty results in fewer shares being submitted.While this change doesn't affect mining rewards, there is a minor downside, and that's that the precision of speed estimates gets drastically reduced.For this reason, slower miners may prefer pools with a lower share difficulty, so that they can get more precise statistics on their workers.