Crypto Mining Blog

In the last month or so we have seen a steady increase in the network difficulty of Litecoin, the second biggest crypto currency at the moment after Bitcoin, in terms of market capitalization. This is direct result from more and more Scrypt ASIC miners being shipped to customers by companies such as Gridseed, Zeus and Innosilicon, even though most of the GPU miners have already moved to other crypto algorithms that do not yet have ASICs such as X11, X13 and others. What we are essentially seeing is centralization of the Scrypt mining hashrate in the hands of larger miners and mining farms, even though there are still quite a few small miners that have purchased some of the more affordable Gridseed and ZeusMiner Scrypt ASIC miners. In fact, what is getting more attractive for the normal small time miner are the services offering to host miners or even for cloud mining, as these cloud be easier to calculate and are more predictable over the long term and most of all no delivery times, extra cost and having to manage and monitor hardware all of the time. Unfortunately there is yet not enough competition like in the Bitcoin cloud mining segment for such services, so the price and features offered to customers are not yet that great, but hopefully we are soon going to see some more advancement in this field as well.

At the same time, with Litecoin getting harder to mine because of the increase of the network difficulty, what we are seeing is also a decrease of the price instead of increase. Interestingly enough, up until recently, Litecoin’s price was reacting pretty much the same way as Bitcoin’s, so it went up and down as the price of BTC increased or decreased, but that is not happening anymore. If this is a good sign or not is still early to tell, but since LTC is not yet as established as Bitcoin and the hardware manufacturers, especially the companies making ASIC miners may still see LTC as an extra source of income, apart from their sales of mining hardware, by mining in their own mining farms and dumping coins on the market instead of using some of their profits in order to support the crypto currency to be able to sell more hardware. As the moment with the current prices of most Scrypt ASICs and the performance they offer it is hard to decide to invest in them or not, especially when knowing that in a month or two there will be much more powerful solutions starting to hit the market, products that will seriously increase the network difficulty.

Furthermore, apart from LTC (number two) and maybe DOGE (currently number 7 in terms of market cap), there are no other more established and serious in terms of market capitalization Scrypt-based crypto currencies among the top 20. Feathercoin (FTC) is the closest one that takes the third place in terms of market capitalization among Scrypt crypto currencies in 23rd place at the moment, but it is much smaller than DOGE, let alone LTC. Then there is Karmacoin at 26th place, however the team behind this coin has already announced plans to move away from Scrypt, CureCoin at 27th place, PotCoin is 28th and a few others close by. There are also not a lot of new Scrypt-based coin launches happening lately, with maybe only Razor being a more interesting recent launch. So what will be the near future of Litecoin and other Scrypt currencies, it is still hard to predict, but we are still remaining positive about it and hope to see more decentralization of the network, instead of centralization as that is never a good thing in the world of crypto currencies.