Posts Tagged ‘alternative cryptos’

Litecoin Newtork Difficulty Will Soon Decrease a Bit

21, Mar 2014

litecoing-network-difficulty-latest

The last week or so you have probably seen the Litecoin difficulty increasing significantly, but now it should get back to a more normal level getting down a bit, though the steady and slow growth may still continue. The reason for the rapid growth in the last week was most likely the CexIO Doubled Rewards for Litecoin Mining promotion that has attracted a lot of attention. This has lead to many users switching from various alternative crypto currencies to LTC mining, but now that this promotion is over they are getting back to other more profitable coins and pool with automatic profit switching instead of directly mining Litecoin. Another thing that has probably lead to increase in the difficulty and Litecoin popularity (the spike in LTC price as well) in the last few days was the announcements of for LTC trading in two of the biggest crypto currency exchanges in China. And then there is of course the Gridseed with their BTC/LTC mining ASIC devices that are selling really fast and adding more and more hashrate to LTC and other Scrypt crypto currencies.

In the long term we should be seeing the price of LTC getting higher and the coin getting more independent from Bitcoin as it will also become harder to mine due to the increase in difficulty. Later this year we are expecting other companies that are making Scrypt ASIC devices to also start shipping more powerful hardware such as the 5 MHS and 25 MHS Alpha Technologies ASIC miners as well as the just recently announced 100 MHS Titan ASIC from KnCMiner. Other companies might as well release products and Gridseed will most likely as well offer a more powerful mining solution combining more than 5 chips in a single device. This all will inevitably lead LTC on the same way that BTC has gone already, taking away the coin from the many users mining with GPUs and moving the generation of larger amounts of Litecoins to the serious miners that can invest in a lot of ASIC mining hardware. All of this will bring forward other alternative cryptos that are not based on the Scrypt algorithm as ASIC devices designed for it will be able to mine all Scrypt coins, so coins with other algorithms may get more popular. GPU miners will probably move to coins using Scrypt-Adaptive-Nfactor, SHA-3 Keccak, Scrypt-Jane and other of the many algorithms.

New Lower Litecoin Difficulty Again For the Next 3 Days

11, Feb 2014

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The Litecoin Difficulty has dropped again, this time from 3508 down to 2674 (-23.76%), so the LTC mining profitability is yet again higher than on the previous difficulty. The reason of course are the many users mining for DOGE, MaxCoin, MetisCoin, VertCoin and other alternative crypto coins instead of directly mining LTC. At the moment DOGE profitability is just about 15% higher than directly mining for LTC, so you can very well expect that the next difficulty adjustment for Litecoin will go up and then down again and then up as the tendency has shown lately. This makes the use of pools such as LTC Rabbit an interesting alternative than directly going back to mining LTC as you are still getting payed directly in Litecoin + some altcoin bonus as an extra.

Using LTC Rabbit as a Backup Pool for Multipool

11, Feb 2014

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If you are mining for alternative scrypt cryptos at the moment due to their higher profitability compared to LTC, you are probably already using Multipool or another similar automatic switching pool. We are using Multipool and set one mining rig with four 280X cards on Multipool and have set LTC Rabbit as a backup pool to test instead of WeMineLTC or Coinotron that we usually set as our backup. The idea behind that pool is that you mine for anternative scrypt-based cryptos based on profitability along with LTC and you are directly getting payed in LTC, so this there is no need to transfer the mined alternative coins to an exchange and trade them for LTC. This way you get extra profit than directly mining for LTC. Our idea was to see what you can expect to get when Multipool has issues and they do have and the connection to their pools drops, so the miner goes to the backup pool. The result we’ve got for 24 hours is 0.07 LTC profit at the backup pool and about 1.09 LTC when we exchanged the mined alternative cryptos from Multipool to LTC. So if you do not have a backup pool set it will be a wise idea to do so in your miner (cgminer does support that, CUDAminer does not yet) and do use a different mining pool. Meanwhile we are heading for another drop in LTC difficulty in few hours, so the profitability of alternative cryptos such as DOGE will drop compared to directly mining LTC…


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