Crypto Mining Blog
It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
Search
Search Results
Litecoin is Still on the Rise, Testing $8 USD
9, Jul 2015
The exchange price of Litecoin (LTC) is still on the rise with the alternative crypto currency already testing the $8 USD target and this has caused a lot of speculation about the reasons behind this recent rise. Some people say it could be due to the recent high load on the Bitcoin blockchain and transactions processing slow due to a lot of unconfirmed ones in the backlog. Other say the reason could be just another pump and dump scheme by a big player with a lot of coins. Another plausible possibility is due to the upcoming fist halving of the LTC reward at the end of August, or the unfavorable situation in Greece at the moment or that on the issues with the China stock markets and the list goes on and on…
Regardless of the reason behind the jump in the exchange rate it is already causing increased demand for Scrypt ASIC miners and services offering Scrypt cloud mining, however nowadays these are scarce and had to find. The best thing you can probably get at the moment is an Innosilicon A2 Scrypt ASIC miner at a discounted price if you manage to find yourself a good deal for a SilverFish Scrypt Blade miner. With Bitmain Tech and ZeusMiner canceling their Scrypt ASIC projects last year (maybe they can restart them if the trend continues) and KnCMiner stopping to sell their Titan Scrypt ASICs and any other ASIC miners to end users there is just one new interesting option coming up. The new SFARDS SF100 Dual-Miner ASICs that are supposed to be available later this month, though SFARDS is still keeping silent about their pricing and expected availability is said to be July.
In the end it is good that we are finally seeing some movement surrounding LTC along with some other Scrypt crypto currencies as nothing much has been happening around Litecoin in the last few months, so the recent price jump and revived interest is definitely a good thing for people that are into altcoins. Especially now that Bitcoin mining is moving away from home miners and more and more towards large mining farms, whereas Scrypt mining is still at a phase where it is still focused mostly in the hands of small mining operations. So we are keeping a close eye on the development around Litecoin and so should you…
Lately we are seeing an interesting development in the world of BTC and LTC mining, there is a rapid increase in the difficulty and network hashrate of Litecoin even though the price is not that high. With Bitcoin we are seeing a slight drop in the network hashrate and difficulty, and the prognosis for the next adjustment is also for a decrease in the hashrate and difficulty. While we are expecting LTC difficulty to continue to rise with more ASIC miners getting introduced on the market, we are kind of surprised to see the slight drop for BTC. The reason for that is probably the old mining hardware that is getting too expensive to run with the current low exchange rate for Bitcoin and is taken offline.
Below we are going to take a look at some common hashrate amounts for both BTC and LTC and see what you can currently mine with them in the form of USD at the current level of difficulty and at the current exchange rates. Do note that the below numbers represent the estimated daily coins that you might be able to mine and there are no expenses calculated for electricity.
Bitcoin:
10 GHS – 0.04339 USD/day
100 GHS – 0.4339 USD/day
1 THS – 4.339 USD/day
10 THS – 43.4 USD/day
100 THS – 433.9 USD/day
1 PHS – 4339 USD/day
Litecoin:
1 MHS – 0.0676 USD/day
10 MHS – 0.676 USD/day
100 MHS – 6.76 USD/day
1 GHS – 67.6 USD/day
10 GHS – 676 USD/day
100 GHS – 6760 USD/day
Here is how things look in terms of an average cost for electricity that you would have to pay for a certain hashrate for both BTC and LTC to get an idea about the costs associated with running an ASIC miner for mining Bitcoin or Litecoin. You would need to deduct these costs from the numbers above as they represent only what you will be mining if converted with the current exchange rate. Do note that the average price per KHW of power can greatly vary based on your location, so the costs can vary quite a bit, so the numbers below are just a rough estimate. We base the power usage estimate for BTC using 1000 GHS at 800W as per Bitmain AntMiner C1 specifications (0.8 Watt/GHS) and for LTC using the 100 MHS at 1100W as per Innosilicon A2 MEGA Terminator specifications (11 Watt/MHS). As an average price in USD of the energy used for the estimated numbers below we are using 13 Cents per Kilowatthour.
Electricity costs for hashrate:
1 THS Bitcoin – 2.496 USD/day
100 MHS Litecoin – 3.432 USD/day
So the actual daily profit after paying for the electricity with a 1 THS Bitcoin ASIC miner at the moment will get you just about $1.843 USD per day, $55.29 USD per month if the difficulty level remains the same with a miner that can cost you something like 10 times what you can earn in a month. The actual daily profit after paying for electricity with a 100 MHS Litecoin ASIC miner at the moment will get you about $3.328 per day, $99.84 USD per month with the current conditions with a miner that can cot you about 15 times what you will earn in a month.
This makes the mining model of mine now and sell the coins immediately to cover the costs not so attractive at the current exchange rates and if you don’t have more up to date hardware or free electricity there is not much point to continue mining with old hardware. At least in the winter you could take advantage of the heat generated by the miners to save on heating at home for example, or use the cold temperatures outside for better cooling and save on extra electricity costs for properly cooling miners. The idea to mine now and save the coins to sell them later when the exchange rates are more favorable seems more attractive, but it is also riskier, especially for big mining operations that do have significant operational costs. With cloud mining operations the maintenance fees that you would have to pay are even higher than what you need to pay for electricity at home and you still need to purchase the hashrate itself. So the levels of daily profit can easily get even two times lower than the ones we calculated above if you mine at home and pay for electricity that is not too expensive in your region.
As we are nearing the end of July, Alpha Technology, a Scrypt ASIC manufacturer has announced that they will not be shipping this month as they were previously targeting in order to beat the competition. The company announced that they have had technical issues during tape-out which has caused them to redo some portion of the ASIC layout one more time thus delaying the chip fabrication. According to them the tape-out is mid-way now and there should be no more delays, also in parallel to the tape-out process they have already started the fabrication of the PCB’s and enclosures. Regardless the shipping has now been moved to September, so there is some chance that KnCMiner might start shipping their Titan units earlier by the end of the next month, even though Alpha Technology were supposed to try hard to deliver first. And while this is not so good as new for the people that have pre-ordered Scrypt ASIC miners from Alpha Technology, though quite a lot have already requested or even received their refunds, it is good news for the people that have purchased some of the currently available Scrypt ASIC miners such from Gridseed, ZeusMiner, Innosilicon as they will have more time with smaller increase in the total network hashrate before the big miners start shipping.