Three Parts: Litecoin is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, though it uses some fundamentally different algorithms to process, called 'Scrypt'. Initially this made it easier for people with home computers to mine, but dedicated mining machines called ASICs can now process Scrypt coins like Litecoin, making it difficult to get in without a large investment. Still, if you want to try your hand at mining, you can have everything setup in an afternoon, and if you join a mining pool you can start seeing Litecoin returns almost immediately. Understand the basics of cryptocurrency mining.

I’m Done Mining Litecoin. Between April and August, LTC mining difficulty. With money you didn’t actually have – equipment that depreciates in. Litecoin Mining Machine. Litecoin Ltc Scrypt Miner Mining Machine View larger image. For Antminer L3+ 504MH/s of Litecoin LTC Scrypt Miner mining machine asic chip.

Traditional currencies are printed to increase the amount of cash in circulation. Cryptocurrency such as Litecoin is generated by machines that solve complex algorithms. Whenever a 'block' of algorithms is finished being processed, more currency is released into the market, usually as a reward to the miner that finished the block. • Mining algorithms become more difficult as more currency is mined.

This is intentional as it helps prevent all of the possible currency from being mined immediately. The practical side effect is that the longer you wait to start mining, the less likely you are to solve blocks on your own. • Mining pools were created to help individuals have a better chance at making money from mining. The mining pool applies all of its members' processing power to solving a block, and if the block is finished by any member, all members get a share of the reward. You'll get far less reward than if you finished the block on your own, but have much higher chances of actually seeing results. Consider alternatives to mining. Unless you're willing to drop thousands of dollars on a dedicated mining machine, or you don't pay for electricity and don't care about the lifespan of your home computer, there's very little reason to mine Litecoins instead of just purchasing them.

The electricity costs of mining 24/7 often outweigh the value of anything you mine, especially if you're using a home computer, and running constantly puts a serious strain on your hardware components. • Litecoin mining is only going to increase in difficulty, as this one of the fundamental principles of cryptocurrency mining. This means that it will get more difficult to mine at a profit unless the value of the Litecoin sees a significant boost. • If you're mining Litecoin to use as a speculative investment or to use an an alternative form of payment, it's usually better to just purchase them outright.

Purchase or build a mining computer ('rig'). In the cryptocurrency world, computers used to mine coins are called 'rigs'. In order to be remotely effective when mining Litecoins, you'll need a computer with at least. Ideally, you'll want four or five graphics cards attached in a custom setup.

You can purchase these online, or you can try building your own, though this requires a fair amount more work than. • You will want at least as much as graphics card RAM. • You'll want some to keep your components alive longer.

Consider an ASIC Scrypt miner. These are dedicated mining machines that can greatly increase your mining power, but they can be expensive for effective ones. ASIC Scrypt miners can come in low-power models too, allowing you to save on electricity. • One of the big benefits of a Scrypt miner is that you can easily change it to mine a more profitable coin as long it is Scrypt-based like Litecoin. • You can get a USB ASIC miner and connect it to a for a low-power miner.

• ASIC Scrypt miners sell out quickly, but you can find them for purchase online at retailers such as Zeus Miner ( zeusminer.com) and Zoom Hash ( zoomhash.com). You may have to put your name on a waiting list for the more popular models. Estimate whether mining will be worth it. Once you've decided on some equipment, look up the market trends for Litecoin and make a projection on how much mining you will have to do to make up the cost of the equipment, power, and internet. If you can purchase the same number or more coins than you will earn mining, you're probably better off just buying the coins. • For example, let's say that your equipment has a hash rate (processing power) of 200 KH/s, which is about the average for a high-end graphics card. The computer uses 600 watts of power to mine, and power costs $0.10/kWh.

Assuming that you're mining solo, mining Litecoin at the current rate (March 2015) with the above setup will cost you $520 per year, and you would never break even.

I came to the conclusion that I had three options on the table at that stage of my experiment mining the crypto-currency: Option 1 – sell up and cut my losses. Option 2 – keep mining at my current rate. Option 3 – buy more rigs and mine even more Litecoin with the hope that the price rises. Option 1, the path of least resistance. That’s the choice I ultimately ended up. My Litecoin mining adventure wasn’t profitable and —if I’m honest—a waste of time.

To redeem something out of the experience, I can at least share with you what I did wrong. If you are thinking about mining Litecoin or some other sort of crypto-currency, you can learn from my mistakes. The main thing everyone wants to know is “how much money did you lose, man?!” Let’s cut to the chase. My costs were: • $16,056.10 on set up (hardware, equipment, shelving) • $5,075.00 on electricity, rent & internet access • $454.92 on credit card interest (approx) Which is a total spend of $21,586.02.

My income was: • $10,709.78 on selling the gear (post ebay fees, postage, etc.) • $2,693.00 selling LTC previously That puts me at a total loss of $8,183.24. However, I do have 894LTC in my wallet. The current price of LTC right now is hovering around $2.50 (ugh), which means if I was to sell my entire LTC stash, I will have lost $5,948.24 all up.

A good scenario is the price of LTC maybe hitting $5 once it’s announced on (see their which addresses this further). Which means, realistically, I will have lost $3,713.24 in total. Ideal circumstances? If I was to sell that LTC for $9.15 per coin, I could break even on the whole thing.

If I sell for $10, I’d make $756. If I sell my stash for $72.50 per coin, I’d be able to buy a sweeeeeett. Yeah, that isn’t going to happen. What went wrong? What could I have done better? I was naive enough to think that the price of LTC would grow so quickly, that it could meet the minimum repayment on my card and cover the costs of electricity, rent & an internet connection. Unfortunately, this did not happen.

I see now—with the benefit of hindsight—that this goal was unrealistic. I totally underestimated the sharp rise in mining difficulty too. I knew it would rise, but not at the rocketing rate it has. Between April and August, LTC mining difficulty grew by 437% – that’s insane!

Image: Setup Efficiencies My setup could have been more refined. I could have been running rigs with 5 cards per motherboard, resulting in a slightly lower initial setup cost and slightly lower power consumption. I could have also flashed the graphics cards’ BIOS (and hence, underclocked the GPUs) for a good balance of power consumption and performance, ultimately saving more power. With 7×5 card rigs, I would have spent $12,502.23 on gear and $1,910.67 on miscellaneous setup equipment. This would have saved me a total of $1,644, which at the end of the day would have been a noticeable difference. There would have been a small decrease in power consumption by having less rigs with more cards, but not by a lot and it’s hard to work out the exact power usage in the real world, especially after system tweaks. Let’s say I achieved a 10% reduction in my power consumption — a generous estimate based on the result of GPU tweaking and rig consolidation.

That would have made my power bill $3,796, instead of $4,218, decreasing my loss by $422. Tweaking the system and consolidating my rigs would have made a difference (to the tune of almost $2000), but not that much of a difference in the overall scheme of things. I still would have lost over $1,000. You Need Cheap Power The key to crypto-currency mining (in Australia at least) is cheap power. Ideally, free power. Many of the people who purchased my gear are mining Litecoin and other coins, and when I asked them how they’re justifying the low profitability, they all said said they’re able to snag free electricity from somewhere. Normally stashing a few rigs at work, hoping nobody notices (hah).

Good luck to them I say! If you can find free power, here’s how it breaks down: Spend $14,500 to set up a farm that should generate around 600LTC month. If you don’t have to pay for power—and assuming the LTC rate of difficulty increases at the same rate—you should have accumulated around 7200LTC. If you end up selling that LTC for say, $6 a coin, how much would you make? $28,000 in profit. Turn around and sell the gear for at least half of its original value, and that number rises to around $35,000.

Assuming your source of free power doesn’t disappear, or find out and call the police for stealing. Image: Solar? Wind? Exploring Alternative Power Solutions But what about solar power? The sun gives us free electricity!

Let’s use it to power our Litecoin farms! Over the course of a year, our 30x GPU Litecoin farm will use 73,634kWh of electricity.

Charged at 18.225c/kWh (still the cheapest power I can find in Australia), the annual power bill will be $13,419. A solar system with enough average peak output to supply 8400W of electricity would cost about $10,000 (you can get 10kW systems installed for $10k these days, cool!). Solar panels that output 10kW will be able to supply all the power we need! Spend $10k to save $13.5k and the panels will last for 20 years giving out free electricity!

Let’s go buy solar panels now!!! Don’t get too excited, though.

There’s a few harsh realities of solar power we need to step through. First of all, the sun doesn’t shine 24/7. At night, we’d need an alternative power source. Normally that’s the grid, but you could also install batteries. If you do, you’ll need enough of them to power 8400W for the time when the sun doesn’t shine, and then enough solar panels to charge the batteries and power the farm itself. You’d be looking at just $25,000 for the panels, let alone the insane amount of batteries you’d need (probably 40 of the biggest deep cycle batteries you can find, which will set you back another $35k). Spending $50,000 doesn’t make sense.

There’s wind power, which if you’re in a windy enough area, can supply power at night, but a 10kW turbine is huge and will set you back $20k easily. Good luck getting a permit to put one up anywhere in Victoria too. Thanks anti-wind farm nutjobs. So the only real alternative is to get a discount on our electricity use by using solar when it shines brightly to give 8.4kW of power, then supplementing it with grid power when there’s not enough light. Solar panel output varies greatly depending on the amount of sunlight. Take these from a 10kW system out in suburban Melbourne. The 10kW solar panels only generated 11,350kW of power over 12 months (there’s a few days missing, so I rounded the number up).

Our farm needs 73,634kWh of power per year, so there’s still a shortfall of 62,284kWh – leaving us with a power bill of $11,352. All we will save is about $2,000/year. In other words, it would take 5 years of mining to pay back the cost of the panels and even once the panels are paid off, you’re still only saving $2,000/year.

Solar panels are great and every home should have them, but as far as Litecoin mining goes, unless you’re in for the super long haul, I wouldn’t bother. What could I have spent my money on instead?

There’s always an opportunity cost involved with this sort of thing. What else could I have done with the same resources and what would have been the result of that? I can’t go back in time to change what I’ve done, but it’s interesting to see what could have been. I whipped up a few spreadsheets to either justify my actions or remonstrate myself for wasting money. Cheap Bitcoin Gold BTG Mining. • $16,000 worth of shares on my credit card, investing in CBA, TLS, BHP and WES would have gained me a $1030 profit, probably less once it’s taxed. • $16,000 of sports betting on the AFL, based on my footy tips results would have left me over $12,000 in debt. • $16,000 worth of LTC on the 3rd of April 2013, those 3655 coins would have been worth $9,913 on the 3rd of August.

So I guess losing approximately $3,800 overall isn’t so bad. Investing in shares like banks and mining seems like a good idea to be honest, especially since how they’re so protected by the government in Australia at least. Would I have done it instead of LTC? Probably not 🙂 What next? It’s pretty obvious that if you can score free electricity, get mining Litecoin NOW. You’d be dumb not to. If you are a bit less risk averse with your investments and an interest in crypto-currency, take a look at these Australian guys making a Bitcoin mining ASIC device.

It sounds really good, and particularly if you’re also in Australia, as you can catch up and talk to the people making it – they seem to be much more transparent than the other ASIC hardware vendors out there. There’s also the bonus of Bitcoin being a bit more legit and more ecosystem and culture around it than Litecoin, which is nice. That’s pretty much it for me in regards to crypto-currency. I don’t really intend to write any further regarding Litecoin or Bitcoin in the near future. There’s so many other interesting things in technology going on out there! I’ll find something else to suck myself into pretty quick. Litecoin mining is a long term commitment (minimum 1 year). I echo Alec’s sentiment and wish this had turned out better for you.

I usually recommend people go in small; one or two rigs like the ones featured at does the trick. The key is diversify, diversify, diversify.

Buy a few Bitcoins, a few Litecoins and maybe build a rig or two. Come back in a year, and you’ll almost certainly have made a profit. Just don’t quit your job to do this.

It’s just a diversification of your income producing assets. Just letting you know, with all of your rigs. If you would had diverted the all the idle CPUs to mine Primecoins when it first released about a month ago. You would have mined over 3K worth in less than one week. Gotta stay well informed on what’s new and profitable to mine here.

While you were mining exclusively with LTC, it would have been better if you mined other alt coins and trade up for BTC/LTC. I’ve setup my mining rig after you and it already paid for itself and I don’t have any free power here either. Best of luck to you, I enjoyed reading your articles.

Keep your current LTCs that you still have and come back in a couple years to see if it multiple in price. No need to take a total lost yet. You failed by having a bad strategy. You failed by selling your hardware. And you failed by not doing your research. You needed to mine *alt-coins* and then sell them for LTC. Profitability mining Scrypt alt-coins has been consistently significantly higher than mining LTC.

For months straight there’s been coins at 150% – 250% profitability of Litecoin mining. Obviously you mine the most profitable coins and switch to other coins as they become more profitable. Or you use an auto-switching pool. Recently I spent a few weeks mining ADT at an average of 200% profitability of LTC. I’ve also kept track of which coins were going to be added to Cryptsy, and mined them at low difficulty before they were added, coming to 1000% profitability of LTC for some.

I used a rig similar to yours, and with expensive power costs. And I’m way in the green – tripled my investment. I use the auto-sale feature on Cryptsy which sells the coins for BTC or LTC automatically as they’re mined. Your plan to “only mine Litecoins” makes you simply stupid.

This whole article can be disregarded as stupidity because you missed out on such a basic requirement. You spent $16,000 on hardware and then couldn’t be fussed to switch the coin you were mining. Fools are easily parted with their money. Pal, you did not fail.

The only thing you did wrong was to leave too early, and to have sold your hardware. At least you have learnt something – we still spend thousands of dollars to have university education. As we stand right now, there are thousands of people just about to start in mining the coins and some will make immense profits within the next two years or so. Start again but first on a small scale using only one GPU rig. If one card rig will make a profit for you, then two will, and then four, and so on and so forth.

Initially, do not go in the direction of using solar panels; otherwise electricity generating firms would already have been using the same to run factories. All in all, this is a very good article you have here.

I live in a beautiful condo in Ontario Canada with unlimited use of electricity, water, and air conditioning all included in my monthly condo maintenance fee of $600. My condo wasn’t relatively expensive either, it cost less than $200k. Best Ubiq UBQ Mining Contract more. Aren’t there any condos in Australia that have something similar?

I should’ve bought all your rigs! Dang As of today (nov 5 2013) there’s almost 1 million USD in buy orders of LTC on Right now I’m only mining with two 7970’s maybe I should buy a few 280X @ $300 each LTC to da moon! Wow, a lot of money:S “”Normally stashing a few rigs at work, hoping nobody notices”” Unveliable! Maybe the right thing is mining with solar only when is shining, and dont waste money on paid electricity. Also, you forgot the magnetic power generators.

They will run 24/7 for you 😉 If you live near to electricity wires, you can install an electro-static generator and get redundant power for free and also creep hair. If you want to make profit with Litecoins, be the pool not the miner. Is a good analogy to “be the boss not the worker.” Good luck. I’m pretty sure You must be pissed off by now LMAO – LTC price 21.500 USD and Going up my friend. One thing that they should told you is that mining any crypto-currency isn’t an In and Out business this is a long time profitability if you will be making 3655 coins @ 21.50 USD that is 78,582.50 and you investment was around 20k the only thing I got to say is “OOOOUCH” it must hurt lol And Wait it’s more I’ve project it that by the end of the year 2013 LTC price will be 29.00 USD so buckle up my friend.

First of all, hard luck but you’re a muppet. You bought – with money you didn’t actually have – equipment that depreciates in order to make money that has zero value until you actually have a buyer for it amusing!

First rule of not falling on your ass. Don’t buy speculation with a credit card. Second rule, the more money you invest, the longer you need to hedge your bets for. Of course it’s risky, but you knew that going in, right? Third rule, never expect anything fueled by speculation to follow set trends.

I started mining with my piffly little Radeon 6970 about a week ago. So far, I’ve spent a grand total of USD$18 on electricity. However, the profit margin I am now making as the LTC price soars to USD$48 is ridiculous because I didn’t spend any real money on this, let alone money I didn’t have in the first place.

I will keep doing this because that electricity cost is a fixed-rate expense, and I can rely on it remaining fixed rate. Litecoin is trading at $37 and was as high as $42 at this current time and more likely will trade higher in the next few days. The problem is most people get greedy, or ether expect it to replace there income and expect to get a quick return and blow money they don’t have, “hence buy rigs on credit”.

Rule number one, never spent, loan, or donate money, you don’t have, or going to need to pay bills. When ever you deal with a project like this, you have to be very patient, it can some times take years to get a return. Plus mining isn’t the best way to make quick cash, actually buying the coins and trading it is and is pretty much what I did, plus had a couple mining rigs. I actually made over 20k profit and still held onto a huge amount of coins, plus the rigs. Just hope you at very least you held onto the 894LTC you had, or have? This is a great post, a lot of useful information for people starting out in this new crazy-but-fun trend.

I guess the days for BitCoin mining with easily available hardware has become close to impossible unless you literally own a mining farm. In my opinion, LiteCoin is the way to go now! I’ve been building some of my own mining rigs since a year now and I’m willing to build them for other people too. What’s in it for me? Of course, the more people joining the race, the more those coins will climb.

Result: The early bird wins. Anyone wanting to buy their own ready-made, turnkey mining rigs can email me.

Cryptocurrency mining is an ecological disaster of stupid proportions ( ) that literally produces nothing of real value to the world and the only tangible thing being waste heat that is only going to get worse. Funnily enough i found this because of the guy pseudo-explaining bitcoin on the 7:30 report. Reading the responses is always amusing, in typical crypto-community fashion, they’re all “the nature of the currency isn’t shit, you just failed the currency, everythings up uP UP, GET ON THE HYPE TRAIN, CHOO CHOO”.

It’s refreshing to see that you cut your losses. The fact that the people you talked to were all using ‘free power’, externalising all the costs onto other people is a typical ‘fuck you, got mine’ attitude that shows that people can’t think outside of their own little world about the real costs of their actions. The effort you put into this article is pretty good and I’m glad to see that you actually EVALUATED trying to use alternative power, and in the process actually showed why a typical setup is an eco-disaster. I really can’t wait untill this bullshit bubble bursts.

Well, that all depends on if you see ‘real value’ in maintaining a global, decentralised payment system for digital currency. A network that’s built around making currency very very difficult to counterfeit. How much power goes into the current financial transaction systems that have those problems inherent in their design & always will? It’s probably a lot.

Which system is more wasteful overall? I don’t know the answer, but it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as the idea that ‘mining Bitcoins is a waste of power’.

Maybe it would be more profitable to sell energy than to consume it? How long would a $10k solar investment take until it pays off? Also, making money is NOT just about making more money, its about budgeting and accountability to know your losses and expenses ahead of time. You could mine 12 hours a day over 24 Take no energy cost while its offline, its not like NOT mining would cost you money. So the least resistance in making money while having little to no expenses, is selling to consumers something renewable in itself.

There’s a technology idea going around that you can create solar farms via special paint instead, which could be considerably cheaper in starting costs. This post is somewhat inactive (last post being a month ago) so I hope my post gets read. Firstly I would like to say that Mr Agius’ report is commendable as it is a form of intellectual capital given without any expectation of reward except to educate/inform individuals such as myself. Secondly, I don’t even know what a GPU is but I find the whole crypto-currency form of exchange incredibly fascinating.

Historians will no doubt look back on this period of time as a defining point in the way individuals and countries engaged in trade and commerce. To be part of that -for me at least-is exciting. Thirdly, and most importantly I want to make the following point. Once you have your litecoins, bitcoins etc forget the cost of acquisition. Cost of acquisition is only relevant when you decide whether or not to invest (i.e. Mine) once you have your coins your mindset has to change because at this point in time you are holding an asset e.g. The 2 most important rules when selling a stock are as follows: 1) No emotion!

Thinking about concepts such as ‘breaking even’ is a type of emotion; i.e. ‘I don’t want to lose money’ 2) only sell when there is a downward trend in the market. Pre-determine what constitutes a downward trend (this can be difficult with cyber-currency as price fluctuations are greater than traditional currencies). An example may be 3 consecutive days of declining value of >3% or a 10% loss in a 7 day period or some other form of measurement. Once this measurement has been satisfied, regardless of whether you’ve made a profit or loss, SELL, SELL, SELL. No one picks the bottom of a market nor does anyone pick its peak (other than by chance). I have no idea as to whether mining of coins is profitable.

But I do know about trading. Mr Agius stated that his 894 LTC were hovering around $2.50, he went through some scenarios, ‘sell at $9.15 break even’, ‘sell at $10 make $756’ etc. Never, in advance, decide what price a share/coin should be sold at, or speculate about scenario’s out of your control e.g. Mt Gox doing this or that.

Let your profits run. That is how traders make money (successful traders generally have more losses than gains, however those gains, although fewer in number are greater in size). Let your profits run, like in sport momentum is everything. Once you’ve identified a downward trend SELL, SELL, SELL. Most of all, don’t expect to get rich only invest what you’re prepared to lose.

I’m not qualified to give financial advice nor am giving financial advice. I would simply like to see entrepreneurs like Mr Agius, get some reward for being brave enough to have a good-old-fashioned crack at it. I have a supplier of solar panels at 0.25 cent per watt used for 5 years with 15 year warenty left on them. I now have a 7kw system that I use and all my over production is fed back to the grid and then back to me as i need it. Im getting ready to add another 2.5 kw system or 10 more panels in about a week. On my current inverters i have room for another 25 panels at 250 watt each. After i add the 10 new ill have room for 15 more.

Good thing is i can pick up a 5400 inverter from my guy for 300.00 usd. Im getting ready to buy a 10 acre piece of land to make an entire off grid system to run the miners on i want to get up to a few ph on my own off grid. Good part is if i just put solar in i will just have the system run during the day and let it rest at night. Im okay with that till i get power storage set up for the night with wind turbines. Im looking to ramp up fast, just as soon as i get my land that is for sale for 10 k usd so next would be a nice 6-8 car sized shop to put them in.

Then start installing the panels and equipment a few at a time as they make mony.