Litecoin Is The Future Of GPU Mining
Posted by 
May 2, 2013 •
Litecoin, conceptually similar to virtual currency Bitcoin but aims to have a fast and lighter structure. Litecoin is generally considered as Silver of crypto currencies while Bitcoin as Gold. Litecoin was born after some of the Bitcoin community enthusiasts joined together on IRC in order to create a real alternative currency similar to Bitcoin.
Litecoin uses a memory hard hashing algorithm called scrypt. The algorithm utilizes SHA256 and a stream function called salsa20 to force devices that mine it to use a lot of memory or dramatically more ALU cycles to perform a hash.
Currently Litecoin can be traded on Vircurex and BTC-e, Mt.Gox also confirmed that they will start supporting Litecoin within the near future. Speculations are, once Mtgox starts Litecoin trading, LTC will be exposed to a much wider audience and interest. We may probably witness a spike in price, hence it is advised to have some litecoin on portfolio.
Litecoin hashrate is currently gaining day by day after recent media coverage. At the moment of writing the network hashrate is 13.9577 GH/s with the difficulty being at 482.5 Litecoin is rising in value and getting more and more media coverage and support. A high end ATI 7990 x 2 card is capable to produce 2305 KH/s, enough to mine 4.8 LTC / Day = 18.1$ at current exchange rate.
Litecoin mining is now a good alternative to Bitcoin mining, where ASICs are cannibalizing the GPU mining by raising the network difficulty day by day. A high end ATI 7990 x 2 card is capable to produce 2400 MH/s, enough to mine 0.12 BTC / Day = 15$ at current exchange rate.
Note : Litecoin use scrypt instead of Bitcoins sha256 as the hashing algorithm, that’s why Litecoin hashrates is generally about 1/1000th in comparison to that of BTC. That’s why same GPU performs 2400 MH/s for BTC and 2305 Kh/s on LTC.
In the last few weeks Bitcoin has risen in price substantially but soon market will be flooded with BFL Bitforce miners. Those little cubes are good with Watt to Mhash ratio. Once BFL starts shipping their orders, even a setup with lots of GPU’s you will not mine you profitable bitcoins anymore. Litecoin is Scrypt based and currently available up to GPU only so it is expected that a lot of Bitcoin miners will migrate to Litecoin. The exchange rate are going upwards and difficulty is still fairly low so GPU miners will make more profit doing so.
Also Check :
- How To Buy Litecoin With USD / Paypal / Credit Card
- How To Mine Litecoin (LTC) With Your PC
- List of Litecoin Mining Pool
“once bfl starts shipping their orders” LOL
This might be true but litecoin is plagued with serious problems and the system has very few programers behind it. With litecoin it is possible to be charged more in fees than you are trying to send. Bitcoin has already worked out these problem but if you mine LTC, you’d better trust that the value will go up because it may be difficult to use it as an actual currency which kinda defeats the purpose of investing in it. It might just so happen that when gpu mining becomes unprofitable people simply quit or buy ASIC devices that are coming down in price, or the loads of FPGA trying to be sold for too much on ebay. The same thing happend when bitcoin went from cpu to gpu.
oh side note, BFL is a joke. Everyone is in a mad panic because they see Avalon selling tens of thousands of their chips and companies have already produced and SHIPPED Avalon based mining devices.