What is Litecoin mining? Learn all you need to get started.

What is Litecoin Mining?

Litecoin mining is done by specialized computers and hardware. It serves two main purposes:

1) It secures the network and verifies transactions.

2) New litecoins are paid out as a reward to miners.

Litecoin Mining Hardware

The Litecoin mining industry is less developed than Bitcoin’s. ASICs—powerful computers designed to solve Bitcoin’s proof of work function—are available for litecoin but difficult to purchase. Because Litecoin uses a different proof of work function Bitcoin miners cannot mine litecoins.

It’s possible, for example, to buy a Bitcoin Antminer S7 ASIC on Amazon for $714. No such miners are available for Litecoin.

The best Litecoin mining hardware available for purchase are graphic cards, but they are not profitable. If you are serious about mining litecoins, one option is to simply mine bitcoins with hardware like the Antminer S7 and convert the earned bitcoins to litecoin.

How Litecoin Mining Works

So, how does Litecoin mining secure the network? Like Bitcoin mining, Litecoin uses proof-of-work which makes mining a costly process in terms of both time and energy.

In order to send litecoins, transactions must be included in a block. Litecoin miners then verify these transactions through proof-of-work. The miners check incoming transactions against previous transactions on the blockchain. If no double-spends are detected, the miners create a block with new transactions and add it to Litecoin’s existing blockchain.

Each new block is then sent to nodes on the network. The nodes use the miners’ work to continue to verify and transmit transactions across the network.

As mentioned earlier, Litecoin mining requires vast amounts of time and electricity, which isn’t cheap. The block reward is paid to miners for each block mined, which provides an incentive for miners to contribute their hashing power to the network.

What is the Blockchain?

The Litecoin blockchain is a public ledger of all Litecoin transactions. Unlike traditional payment systems like PayPal, Litecoin is decentralized and distributed. Its public blockchain can be independently verified by anyone.

No old transactions can be erased, and, likewise, no counterfeit or fraud transactions can be created without network consensus. Any attempt to change network rules would create a fork in the blockchain.

What is Litecoin Mining Difficulty?

One of the main advantages with cryptocurrencies is that the currency supply can be programmed and distributed at selected intervals. This differs from gold, silver and other commodities, which often see mining companies mine at faster rates if price increases.

The Litecoin mining difficulty is perhaps one of Litecoin’s most important features. It is an algorithm that is updated based on total network hashing power to ensure that Litecoin blocks are generated on average every 2.5 minutes.

Imagine this scenario: gold prices rise from $1,200 per ounce to $2,000 per ounce. The increased price would cause gold miners to increase production, and may even push entrepreneurs to create new gold mining businesses. The $800 increase could create so much new supply that the price ends up dropping again.

Cryptocurrencies like Litecoin are different. No price rise can cause an increase in the rate at which litecoins are mined. A sudden increase in Litecoin’s price would likely cause more miners to point hash power at the network. Unlike gold, however, Litecoin’s difficulty ensures that the new hash power would simply be balanced with a rise in the difficulty of the proof-of-work algorithm. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, which is about 3.5 days.

Litecoin Mining Profitability

You can use one of the many litecoin mining calculators to determine the potential profitability of hardware. Litecoin mining profitability will depend on the price of litecoin, hash power of your hardware, electricity costs, and hardware efficiency.

Litecoin Block Reward

Litecoin’s creator, Charlie Lee, essentially copied Bitcoin but change a few parameters. Lee wanted faster confirmations, so he set Litecoin’s block target time to 2.5 minutes instead of Bitcoin’s ten.

Lee also designed the block reward so that it halves every 840,000 blocks. Originally, 50 litecoins were issued in each new block. The block reward eventually becomes so small that there can only be 84,000,000 litecoins in existence. There are many websites that track and estimate block reward halvings.

Watch the video below for more information on Litecoin’s block reward:

What is Litecoin? Want to learn how to mine litecoins? First, mining litecoins is done via scrypt instead of SHA256.

To get started mining litecoins you could get a 70KHs litecoin miner for about $100 or a 30MHs litecoin miner for about $285.

Learn how to buy Litecoin with USD; with EUR; with RUR; and with BTC or practically every currency in the world.

Finding the easiest way to buy Litecoin, minding the nature of cryptocurrencies and methods of converting them. If you exchange your currency into cryptocurrency then it becomes extremely easy to then diversify and trade other forms of cryptocurrency.

How to mine Litecoins on Mac

To get started mining litecoins you could get a 70KHs litecoin miner for about $100.

How to mine Litecoins on Windows

Transcript - What is Litecoin mining?

Hello, and welcome to the Litecoin For Beginners video series. Litecoin is a virtual currency that has emerged as the second most popular and widely accepted cryptocurrency in the world. Bitcoin is currently ranked number one and if you want to watch a Bitcoin For Beginners video, you can click here. But in this video, I’m going to quickly cover what Litecoin is, how it differs from bitcoin in the easiest way to use our computers to mine Litecoin for us.

So Litecoin is a cryptocurrency and cryptocurrencies allow you to send and receive information from one person to another instantly with incredible encryption properties. Now this strength and security for transactions is what really attracts so many people to use it, especially to exchange money and value.

There are a few differences between bitcoin and Litecoin. For one, the number of total coins that can be created within the open source protocol. So with bitcoin, twenty-one million bitcoins can be created. But with Litecoin, eighty-four million Litecoins can be created. Secondly, the amount of time that it takes the network to create new coins is a little different. The bitcoin network creates twenty-five coins every ten minutes. The Litecoin network creates fifty coins every two and a half minutes. Now I’m not going to say why that’s good or bad. A lot of people have different takes on that. However, like bitcoin, each Litecoin can’t be subdivided into a hundred million smaller units. And that’s defined by eight decimal places. So each one point of Litecoin can be divided into a hundred million smaller units.

Now that we understand a little bit more about Litecoin, let’s begin with the Litecoin For Beginners video series. Now in part one, we’re going to accomplish a few things. The first thing we’re going to do is set up our Litecoin wallets so that we can send and receive Litecoins.

Now the second thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to download and configure our mining software so that we can use our graphics processor to mine Litecoin for us. Now as a reminder, I just want to point out that everything that I’m going to be talking about in this video, I’m going to have a download link in the video description. So if you want to skip the tutorial and download all of the software, go ahead and try it out.

So let’s get started. First things first, let’s go download the Litecoin wallet. And we want to make sure that we go to Litecoin.org to download the Litecoin wallet. This is a trusted source and we can download the Litecoin wallet for Windows, Mac or Linux. I have already downloaded the wallet and you can see here’s my shortcut. I’ve already installed it. Now I can launch the Litecoin wallet and you’ll see that when it starts, we’ll see a little splash screen here.

And then when it loads, it’s going to attempt to connect to the Litecoin network, and it’s going to try and sync. But just let it do its things, see now it’s down to ten from eleven. So it goes fairly quickly. The first thing that we want to do is click on receive. And we’re going to create a new address. So click on new address. And let’s give this address a name. Okay. Click on okay. You’ll see your address pop up here.

And there’s nothing that we’re going to do with this address right now, but we need it later in the video. So let’s minimize our wallet. The next thing we’ll want to do is download the mining software. And so for this example, we’ll be using my favorite software called GUIMiner scrypt. Now this is the easiest software to use. Anyone can use it. And I’m going to show you exactly what to put in. So we can download GUIMiner-scrypt from guiminer.org. This is the original website to download the program.

You could see here that there’s a download link for Windows. And if I click on that, I’ll get a little thing here that says “This file is malicious, and chrome has blocked it.” You can dismiss that. It’s not malicious. You might need to go into your settings and configure them to allow you to download this program. If you’re having trouble downloading it, go ahead and click on this link here. Have a look at the official forum thread on Bitcointalk.

If we click on that link there, that will bring us to the official thread and we can download the program from here. So that will work as well to download GUIMiner-scrypt. Go ahead and download that program. I’ve already done that. And so here is the folder that I’ve downloaded. Here is GUIMiner-scrypt. I’ll just double-click on the EXE file, minimize that. And it should pop up after launching the program.

Here is the program, but I have no idea what to put in any of these text boxes. So let’s go through this one at a time and I’ll tell you what to put in. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to find a host. So we’re going to join a pool. Now the pool that we’re going to join in this example is going to be wemineltc.com. But if we check out this website here, Litecoinpool.org/pools, we can see a nice pie chart of all the major pools and their market share in the Litecoin network.

Now I’m going to be showing you WeMineLTC. And this is the largest pool, but they weren’t the largest pool when I created my account. And by no means, is a pool any better because it’s larger. So I definitely encourage you to try out these other pools, like, Coinotron, Give Me Coins, LiteGuardian, because these pools might be better than WeMineLTC. However, I’ve already created my account with WeMineLTC. So that’s the account that I’ll be showing you.

Also, I want to point out this other resource that I found: it’s the Litecoin.info/Mining_pool_comparison. And we can compare all of the pools. In this chart, we can see there’s wemineltc.com. And this would just kind of give us a little bit more information, especially on the fees for that pool and we can just kind of do our homework on the pool. So I definitely recommend checking out the pool that you plan out joining before you join it.

I’ll just go to wemineltc.com, and I’ve already created an account. So you’ll need to create an account, click on my account. The first thing that we’re going to do is change your automatic payout threshold here. Right now it’s on zero, but I’m going to change it from zero to one. And this means that every time, my computer mines one Litecoin, it’s going to automatically send it to my wallet.

So put in my four-digit pin that I created when I created my account. And I’ll click on update settings, and that will update that automatic payout threshold setting. The second thing I’m going to do is change my payment address. So I’m going to go back into my wallet, hit the receive tab. Remember that address that we created, you want to right click on it, copy address, and we’re going to paste that address into this text box.

We’re going to enter our four-digit pin again. And we’re then going to click on send email code. That’s going to send a code to our email account. Once we get that code, we’ll put in our four-digit pin again and we’ll put in the code that they emailed to us and then we’ll click on change address. And that will change our payment address. And so that means every time we mine one Litecoin, it will automatically send that Litecoin to this address, which is the address in my wallet.

Now that we’ve configured our WeMineLTC account, we need to create a worker. And we’ll click on my account, my workers. Now we need to create a worker, and so we can add a new worker down here at the bottom and we can really put in anything we want here. This is just a name for our worker. So let’s just do beginners, my password, make it simple, one, two, three. It’s really not important. And then we’ll click on add new worker.

And when we do that, we’ll see that the worker now has been created. Here it is. And so we’re going to need this information in just a second. Right on the main page, we can see the servers here. So we’re going to choose, just the first server for this example. But you can see there are a number of servers in the United States, in Asia. And this is really so that if you’re trying one of these servers and you can’t connect, you can try a different server and see if that server is just experiencing problems.

So let’s bring up our GUIMiner. And the very first thing that we need is they host. And if we hover over this text box, we see a little hint there. It says host addresses or host address without the http prefix. So we’ll need everything after the slashes here. So I’ll just copy and paste this first host, everything to the dotcom, just like that. And then I’ll copy that, go back to the miner, we’ll paste that in there. Okay. It should look very similar.

But the port is three, three, three, four. So make sure that the port here three, three, three, four. Now the user name is going to be our worker that we just created. So here’s my worker, I’ll copy and paste the worker name right there. My password was very simple, just one, two, three.

Now my device is going to be my graphics card, which is this one here. You can see my processor, my CPU is available. And I could select that. But my graphics processor, which is this one here, it’s going to be about a hundred times faster than my processor. So, you know, choose whatever you can and see what works, see what doesn’t work. If you don’t see your processor or your graphics processor listed here, you may need to update your drivers. Here are the two links for AMD drivers. I’ll provide these two links in the video description.

Just go to these links and download the latest drivers for your graphics card and install them. But first, let’s just try mining with your setup right now. And then the next thing that we’ll need to set is our threat concurrency. So let’s just put ninety-two hundred here. In all of the settings that I’m going to be entering here are really good, just baseline starting point numbers.

And so ninety-two hundred, let’s put vectors, the default value was one. GPU Thread, the default value was one. Work size, default is two fifty-six. Now the intensity, this is really where – this is – this number here is going to make the biggest difference in your kilohertz per second or your megahertz per second speeds. So intensity, twenty is really high; ten is really low. So I’m going to choose something right in the middle. I think fifteen is good.

We want to make sure stratum is clicked yes. And we’re going to click on start. Now it’s either going to work or it’s not going to work. You can see that it’s working for me. And my speed is a hundred and seventy-nine kilohertz per second. If it doesn’t work for you, the very first thing that you should try is selecting something in this drop-down. Because I noticed that if I didn’t select something in this drop-down, sometimes I had glitches. So let’s just select sixty-nine, seventy, okay? It’s going to change some of these numbers.

Really, it’s only going to change this number and this number, which are fine. And let’s just keep all of these numbers like we haven’t and click on start. And you might find that by selecting something in the GPU default, it helps you out and it works for some reason. So you can see that now I’m actually mining faster than I was before. I was at a hundred and seventy-nine kilohertz per second before, now I’m at a hundred and eighty-eight kilohertz’s, two hundred kilohertz’s per second.

And the only number that really changed was this number here and my intensity. So if we increase our threat concurrency, and this is in kilobytes, we can increase our speed. So I’m going to bump the intensity up two-twenty. And I’m going to bump this up to nine thousand. And I’m going to click on start. And I bet it’s higher than two hundred kilohertz’s per second. But you will want to be careful, because if you go too high, you know, if you bump this intensity up to a hundred, it probably won’t make a difference over twenty or twenty-five.

But it’s going to really slow down your computer and it’s – it might be bad for your graphics processors. It could potentially burn them out, overheat them. All in all, these are good numbers to go with, to start off and to see what your speed is for mining. And then you can increase the intensity or increase the thread concurrency a little bit as you see fit, to see if you get better results. Now if you let this run, let’s just say, overnight. And you mine Litecoin all night, all of your statistics are going to be kept in your WeMineLTC profile.

So if I click on stats, I can get to my stats here and my dashboard here on the left-hand side. So that’s it. That’s the easiest way to mine Litecoin. I hope you enjoy part one of the Litecoin For Beginners video series. Please rate, comment and subscribe. In part two, I’ll be going over where do we exchange our money into Litecoin. In case, we’re having problems mining or maybe our computer isn’t fast enough to mine, whatever the reason maybe.

So thank you so much for watching. And I’ll see you in part two.

Transcript - Litecoin Mining on Mac

All right. I’m going to walk you through how to start mining Litecoin on your Mac computer. The first thing you need to do is join a Litecoin pool using CoinHunter. It’s a popular one right now. It doesn’t really matter. You can find tons online. When you get to one of these sites, first thing you need to do is create an account for the site. You can click that button down there. There’s a lot of fields you have to sign out, or you have to fill out to sign up. I’m not going to do it for you because I already have an account, I’m just going to go back to the home page and login directly.

All right. So once you are in, this is what the interior of the mining pool website looks like. All you really need to do in here is go to your account to Workers, which is on the sidebar there. Click that. And then you just need to create a new worker.

I’m going to go ahead and create one. I’ll call it worker 2, I’ll make the password worker 2, as well. Just create that worker. You can see now that there is a new worker created. At this point, there’s a few things you’re going to need to remember that we’ll use later. The first is your username, which is Ardo in my case. The next is the worker name, which in this case is worker 2. And then you also have to know the worker password, which in this case is worker 2, as well. The last thing you need to know is the host name of this pool, which you can find in help. Getting started, you’ll see some for different continents. I’m in North America. So I’m going to go ahead and highlight and copy one of the ones in North America and we’ll use that. We’ll use that later.

All right. So the next thing you need to do is download the actual software to do the mining. That’s available at SourceForge. That’s called CPU Miner. Go ahead and download that. The link’s in the description. It will started your download and while this is going, let’s go over to finder, check out our Downloads folder. You’ll see that it’s a zip file, so you’re going to need to expand that.

So go ahead and double-click that, it will expand, you’ll see this minerd executable, which is basically the program that we’re going to run to mine. Now to run this, we need to use an application called Terminal. You can find that in your applications folder under Utilities. It should be all the way at the bottom here, yep, double click it. You open up a Terminal, it looks like this.

If you’re not comfortable with it, that’s fine, I’m going tell you exactly what’s you need to type to get this running, then you start with CD downloads, which is going to take you into the Downloads folder, basically, which is right at minerd file list. You then need to change the permissions on minerd. So, you type chmod 755 minerd, which is going to allow you to run the file.

And then you’re ready to run it, you need to dot, slash, minerd. The first thing you need is dash O and then you paste that host name that you copied earlier. The next thing you need is dash U, which is going to be your username. You need to put your pool username dot your worker name. So in my case, it’s ardo.worker2. After that, you need dash P, which is going to be your worker password. In my case, this is worker 2, as well.

Then just go ahead and hit enter and you’ll see that the program is now running and you are – you’re mining for Litecoins. So I’m going to jump ahead now. This has been running for about thirty minutes. You can see it’s still going. The hash rate is a little higher now. But more importantly, you see these accepted messages which means that you are, in fact, generating valid Litecoins.

If you zoom out now and go back to that mining pool website, go ahead and refresh that. You can confirm that this is working here, as well. You’ll see that you now have a hash rate, which means your program is running at that given rate. You can confirm down here, as well. You can take a look at your specific worker and see that that worker definitely is generating hashes.

Transcript - Litecoin Mining on Windows

Hey there! So in this video I’m going to show you how you can mine Litecoins on Windows. And there’s basically two ways that people tend to do it and first one is by using CPU miner which uses your computer’s processor to do the mining and then there is GPU mining which uses your graphics card for the mining. And the GPU mining tends to be faster, but CPU mining is still useable. So but you can basically run both of them at the same time to maximize your yield. And most people do this through a mining pool, just because it’s more efficient that way. Otherwise it will just take ages for you to do anything unless you have like a huge computer farm or you can have like massive amounts of hashing power available, but usually for hobbies and the general normal people doing it through a mining pool usually ends ups being the better choice.

So to get started you’re going to have to download the Litecoin wallet application and you can do that from Litecoin.org. And there is versions available for Windows, Linux and Mac, but I’m just going to go through the Windows version this time. So once you’ve done that and you’ve installed the Litecoin wallets then what you want to do is you want to create maybe create a new address. You can use the main one here. Oh, yeah. And here you’ll have the synchronizing bar here. It will take like hours to synchronize this stuff. What you want to do is you want to maybe create a new one for your mining pool. Like I’m using Burnside’s Litecoin mining pools. And I made this address for it, for this computer. As you can see I just installed this like a few hours ago. It’s still at like 30 weeks behind. But, yeah, basically once you’ve done that like click in here a new address, entered a label and once you’ve done that click okay and it will automatically generate an address there. And then you click on that, on the label and click on copy address and you’ll have the address on your clipboard.

Once you’ve done that you should go and create an account on Burnside’s mining pool site which is ltc.kattare.com. And once you’re here you click on register and you enter your details in here and then you just click the register button. And you don’t need to verify your email or anything so you can just log in straight away. And once you’re logged in you can go ahead to your account settings and here under account settings here you can enter your payment address which is the one you’ve just created in your wallets and copy it to your clipboard. So you just paste that stuff in here and enter your pin code. Yeah, you have to remember your pin code and then click update account settings.

So what that will do is it will enable you to start mining, because now they have an address where they pay your yield. And next thing to do would be to create new workers, if you’re going to use both CPU and GPU mining. What I did here like that they have by default there is one worker and had a default password is X. But what I did here is I just for esthetics more or less I created these two, one for the CPU miner and one for the GPU miner. And yeah, basically how you do that is down here you just type like GPU 2 and add password, whatever. And then click add worker. You have it there, but I’m not going to use that so just click delete.

And yeah, once you’re done here you can move on and download the mining software. And one of them is CPU miner which you can find in here on this thread at bitcointalk.org. And I’ll have all these links and stuff in my description and on my website so don’t worry about that. You can check it out from there. Basically, yeah, here is the CPU miners available in 32 bit, 64 bit versions for Windows and I’m using the 64 bit one. So you just download it from here and then you extract it to your desired location. I put it actually in my Litecoin folder. I made another folder called miners. And then I put both the CPU and a GPU miner in here. So that’s what I did, but you can do it differently of course.

But any way extract it to your desired location and then you need to make a BAT file so that you can like log into the Kattare – to Burnside’s Litecoin mining pool. And the way I did that as like on my desktop here for example. It’s just an example. You can right click and make in your text document. Now if you have the suffixes here so that you can see them, you can edit that and just rename it BAT. And then rename the file to minerd_64. Just click yes and then you right click that and edit. And what you want to put here is minerd.exe - o that’s the port number and then space - O and this is for your user name and password and space and user name. This is where you put your – you don’t type username. Type your name that you created for the website and then dot workers suffix. And that’s the one like CPU1 that I put in here. This one. That’s the suffix, worker suffix. And colon worker password and that’s the worker password here, that one.

And then you just go ahead. Well, you can still – I’ll put the Q there it just make quite, but there’s a bunch of options here if you go with your like CMD EXE file or whatever like in your command prompt. And you go here and you type minerd help. Then you’ll see all these different options here like threads. By default it has number – the number of threads attached by default is the number of processors you have but you can modify that as well by, you know, putting T like if I want like one thread then I just dash T space one and so on. And then you basically just save that and then from your desktop, control C, copy it and then you paste it in here where your mining executable file is. But this needs to be in the same folder. And then after that you can create like a shortcut of the BAT file to your desktop. Like that. And then you just run it off that when you want to mine.

And yeah, so the next one would be the GPU miner. The Cudaminer is only for NVidia graphics cards. There’s a different one for Radeon graphics cards which you find here on the Burnside’s site. You go here to get started. Click on get started. Once you’re logged in and then it will show you these details here. And basically CG Miner and a Reaper GPU miner they’re both for Radeon series graphics cards. But I don’t have any of those graphics cards so I can’t really use them. But you can download Cudaminer. I’m just going to show you how to set up Cudaminer.

You can download it from this thread at Bitcointalk called Cudaminer, a new Litecoin mining application Windows/Linux. And you download the newest version which has a 32 bit and 64 bit version in the same zip file as well as the source code in case you want to compile it on Linux or compile it on Windows yourself to make some tweaks or whatever.

And you basically extract. What I did I extracted the whole thing into my download folder and then I went into the, I guess, the 64 bit folder and copied that here and the I renamed it to this and what it will have is a BAT file a bit like this but it’s slightly different because Cudaminer uses stratum. So it will have a different address when you want to connect to that. So you do the same process, like make a new file, cudaminer_64.bit and then you enter this stuff in here and the main difference being at the address stratum + ttp://ltc-stratum.kattare.com and the port is different as well, 3333.

But otherwise it’s basically the same because Cudaminer is based off of the CPU miner so it has a lot of the same, you know, configurations and stuff. But, yeah, once you’re done there you just go ahead and copy paste it in here to your Cudaminer directory. And then you make another shortcut for the BAT file. And then you run it off of that and, yeah, as you can see it’s working and mine with this right now. Control C to terminate and this is working as well.

So that’s how you mine Litecoin.

Written by Litecoin Mining on June 16, 2015.

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