The Current and future state of Litecoin

Science, Engineering, & Tech Cryptocurrencies
1

Today i would like to discuss the current and future state of litecoin mining and why i think litecoin mining is more efficient with consumer-grade hardware than bitcoin. So i started my litecoin misadventure 1 month ago when i heard about it in the technology section on 4chan... So i decided to download it. Ever since then i have been making around 0.5-1 litecoins a night. I also like to trade my litecoins aswell on BTC-E i would sell my ltc at around $4 and wait for it to drop $2 so i can buy twice the amount. Anyway let me get into why i believe litecoin mining is better for the average power pc and consumer grade pc as well. My GPU is a 6870. With bitcoin mining i can get around 265.mhash average which is really bad at the current difficulty for bitcoins. I can barely make 0.02 per 16 hours which is pathetic. But switch to the other end of the spectrum and look at litecoins. With my current setup i am making 0.5-1 per 16 hours. Reason because of this is because there are more people with business grade hardware in the bitcoin scene. We are talking about full fledged businesses with racks of computers dedicated to mining bitcoins, And it does not end there. Soon Butterfly Labs will be shipping widespread devices known as ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Basicly means they are dedicated to mining bitcoins. These devices get anywhere between 5gh/s to 1500gh/s of mining power. To put that into perspective the average consumer will be doing around 300-1000 mh/s yea.... Which means people with non dedicated devices like us will be alienated out. So Why litecoins are better for the average person with our hardware? And why are they future proof? Because litecoins cannot be mined using ASIC devices.. Litecoins sort of reject this. You cant build a device soley dedicated to litecoin mining like you can with bitcoins. Which means we people with our computers can mine them without worry of big businesses using up the entire litecoin network infrastructure and leaving us will almost nothing comparably.

So in my opinion Litecoin mining is far better for the average person. Now if you join a bitcoin pool and all the funds are meant to go to one person that is way better of a scenario. Take the Tek syndicates pool for example. They have a mining pool. All the mining power of the users goes directly to them meaning they have amazing power. As if they have hundreds of ASIC devices. This i can support but at this point and time mining bitcoins with consumer grade hardware for profiting yourself is dying out very rapidly with businesses and ASIC wanting into the bitcoin game.

My current setup is i mine litcoins from 12Am to 3Pm then when i get home from school at 3. I turn on my bitcoin miner to mine in the Tek Syndicate pool and support these amazing guys from 3Pm to 12Am That way i make profit to help pay off school related stuff. While able to support The tek.

Anyway this is my current opinion on bitcoin mining for personal profit compared to litecoin mining at this point. And if you dont want to mine litecoins. I suggest take out around $200 and invest in litecoins. Which at this price will get you around 60 litecoins to keep and sell when litecoins eventually sky rocket in price as bitcoins have. 

2

You hit on a lot of good points. Get's me interested in starting to mine LiteCoin myself when not dedicating my GPU to the BitCoin team. However your point about Butterfly Labs's ASIC is a bit flawed. Those ASIC's do not exist yet and they never will. Their website claims you can preorder them a year before they are released, the only picture they have is a render of a small black box, and they given no hardware information about the units. For a small thing like that to be mining 5GH/s for like $274 doesn't make any logical sense. Currently 4 7970's at work can pull a max of about 2.7GH/s, maybe a bit more, and that's about $1600 of GPU power. However I am curious as to where LiteCoin is heading and I hope to see the ability to convert LiteCoins into BitCoins and vise versa sometime in the future.

3

I'm going to turn one machine on and put in into the TS bitcoin pool (usign a 7970) and I'll turn another machine on to run litecoin with a 7870 (might upgrade to a 7970). I'll let everyone know how it goes. 

4

Is that a wild logan? I'm going to catch it lol

I might do some litecoin mining

5

Sounds good ;) We can get some comparative results that way.

6

I mine litcoins on my laptop cpu. it's worthless for bitcoins, but I get like .1 litcoins/night....

7

So is litecoin better if you're a lone wolf? Don't get me wrong, I'm not looking to make big bucks, just a few pocket coins :)

8

hmm. i have thought of this. But i have never really considered this.... But when you put it into perspective it does make sense. They have been known to scam customers before. Some guy even made an entire website based off the fact that he thinks it is not real. Because when he went to CES or some other technology convention he talked to the CEO of butterfly labs and when he questioned if he could see the parts and how/ if it worked the man yelled at him. He even got it on video. I have to check and see if i can find it in my history it was pretty interesting. And btw you can convert litecoins into bitcoins. Go to https://btc-e.com/ and click on the LTC/BTC tab. Thanks for the feedback.

9

someone should set up a lightcoin mining guide, i know id love to have one available.

 

10

THis is what i used to get started: http://ltc.kattare.com/gettingstarted.php

11

This is some food for thought. I may consider doing some litecoin mining rather than bitcoin mining, as I'm broke and don't need to worry about the power bill.

Side question: is there as much of a difference between AMD / NVIDIA on the litecoin side, is that hardware based? :P

12

I use a pool....

13

"Side question: is there as much of a difference between AMD / NVIDIA on the litecoin side" 

There is still a huge difference between the two.

Here is a link to a litecoin hardware comparison based on kh/s: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

As you can see the top two nvidia cards only do 92 and 120 kh/s while the top two AMD card do 655 max and 750 kh/s max which is a big difference. So if your gonna do any mining bitcoin or litecoin AMD is still the prefered choice.

14

now mining litecoins half the time, bitcoins for the teksyndicate team the other half time i have. :P thanks for the tip

15


You say it! I very much agree with your point of view!I hope to be able to see your published posts.

[url=http://www.mmoggg.de/]wow gold[/url]|[url=http://www.mmoggg.de/Guild-Wars-2/]GW2 Gold[/url]|[url=http://www.mmoggg.de/]wow gold kaufen[/url]|[url=http://www.mmoggg.de/Diablo-3-gold/]diablo 3 gold[/url]

16

I think I'm gonna join the trend of mining Litecoins personally and pooling into TS for bitcoin mining, got a new Tahiti chip and figured I could put it to good use. 
Thanks for the info and guide! 
Kind of new to this stuff, any words from the wise? 

17

Don't expect to get rich ;)

18

this is most likely user error. there is no way my 560 is getting 130kh/s while a 670 and 680 are getting less. they should be getting around 200 at least. but yes amd is still better at this. i just picked up a 7850 for 124$ as well :D

19

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin




Not Silver to Gold

Some argue that Litecoin cannot make sense as "silver to bitcoin's gold", because Bitcoin itself is both gold and silver: While in the long-run, the BTC unit may be too valuable for everyday trade ("gold"), there are other, much smaller units that can just as well serve the purpose of "silver" while being naturally/automatically "converted" to/from BTC.

Vulnerability to mining monopoly

Similarly to Bitcoin, Litecoin can be attacked by an entity that can match or exceed the hashrate of the network. Such a "51% attack" becomes more difficult to launch and maintain as the hash rate of the network grows. However, this argument posits that Litecoin is designed to be inefficient on all common computer components (both CPUs and GPUs) meaning that a malicious entity need only produce a small batch of specialized/custom hardware to overtake all the commodity mining systems combined.

Memory bandwidth refutation

Some attempt to refute this by arguing that scrypt is not designed to be inefficient, but is instead designed to be highly dependent on memory bandwidth. Since the high-speed cache RAM on modern processors already takes up most of the die space, no sizeable improvement could then be made by creating custom chips. If we accept this argument we then estimate the cost of attack utilizing GPUs that are avilable today.

To do so we start with an estimated cost of hardware at $600 per megahashes per second and the March 14, 2013 Litecoin network hashrate of 2,500 megahashes per second. The total amount of equipment necessary to match and takeover the Litecoin network via 51% attack is then an estimated $1.5M USD (or about 5,000 AMD HD 5970s). There are tens of thousands of GPUs that are in the process of being made unprofitable for mining on the Bitcoin network ASICs. While these GPUs may be redeployed for Litecoin, a proportional and sustained rise of the Litecoin exchange rate would be required to support this additional GPU mining activity.

Pump and Dump Scheme

According to some, one or more of the aforementioned reasons imply that Litecoin has no future potential, and therefore effectively functions as a "pump and dump" scheme, rewarding those who get in sooner at the expense of those who adopt it just before it finally fails (and are left with nothing).

Additionally, people often complain that the Litecoin community misrepresents it in other ways, such as portraying "faster block times" as if it makes transactions faster, and scrypt as if it is resistant to ASIC or FPGA hardware, in order to pretend Litecoin has value and inflate its value.

It's important to note, generally these critics do not think that Litecoin/Blockchain currencies are pump and dump schemes "per se"; but rather that the existing network effect of Bitcoin, combined with the lack of meaningful differentiation between Litecoin and Bitcoin and Litecoin's adoption of a "designed to fail" proof-of-work algorithm; that Litecoin is bound to fail in the end. Bitcoin does not suffer from these "flaws" and therefore does not fall under the "pump and dump" scheme, according to this argument.  

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Litecoin



 




Can anyone refute some of these claims? 



Much of the later part of this Wiki appears to be argued from a biased stance, not an objective scientific stance as is the norm for most itterations of wiki. Does anyone else see this?

 

 



Am I just going crazy disagreeing with most of what's said above? 

20

This is something I posted on a different forum but I think it is pretty relevant.

I have been mining since June 2012 back when bitcoin was around 8$ I could make about .1 a day. Now it takes about 5 days to make .1. Technically 5 days in June would be about $4 while 5 days now will make me about 15$, so YES it is still cost effective to mine today however I would recommend mining lite coin because in 5 days with that It is about $19. I have a single 6950 with unlocked shaders(so really it is just a 6970) this gets me 400Mhs for btc or ~400khs for ltc.