It Is All About BTC, LTC, ETH, DOGE, KAS mining as well as other alternative crypto currencies
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.
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.
The Litecoin Difficulty has increased after dropping significantly down to 2820 the previous time. The new Litecoin difficulty is 3508 and that is an increase with a bit over 24% than the previous one. The result is that LTC mining profitability got lower and at the moment alternative crypto mining such as DOGE coins for example is even more attractive than directly mining for LTC than before. Another interesting crypto coin that recently has generated a lot of attention is VertCoin (VTC) as it is an alternative crypto that does not use the typical Scrypt method, but a modified one and is claimed to be Scrypt ASIC resistant. Protoshares are also another interesting option for GPU mining as they are also gaining more user interest since the recent adoption of GPU mining as they were previously mined only with CPU. And for CPU only mining Primecoin (XPM) is still a good choice, though the profitability is not that attractive as the one of coins that can be mined with GPUs.