Litecoin Mining: How To Mine LTC Cryptocurrency User Guide?

A fork of bitcoin, Litecoin (LTC) was created by former Googler, Charlie Lee, in 2011 as an answer to some of bitcoin’s problems at the time. One of them was bitcoin’s long wait time for transaction confirmation.

As one of the top cryptocurrencies in the market, Litecoin has a total circulation of 81,000,000 and a market cap that exceeds $8 billion USD. Litecoin is fast becoming even more popular and gaining acceptance globally, resulting in increased demand for its tokens.

Which makes now the perfect time to get into Litecoin mining. Unfortunately, Litecoin can’t be mined using your regular computer processors, you need a Litecoin Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) mining hardware to do the job.

These LTC mining hardware are designed for the sole purpose of mining Litecoin, and nothing else. There are two ways to go about mining Litecoin.

• Solo mining
• Pool mining

In solo mining, you’ll just buy the Litecoin miner, set it up and allow it mine those tokens. With pool mining though, you’ll have the opportunity to find people who are also mining Litecoins, and add your Litecoin miner hardware to their mining pool.

Both mining methods have their benefits and demerits. The choice is yours, really. However, we would suggest that you do more pool mining as against solo. This is because pool mining tends to make you more money, even after the mining pool’s service charges.

Similar to its parent crypto, bitcoin, Litecoin also awards every block mined with 50 LTC –that’s $7500 per block @ 1 LTC = $150, and will continue to do so until 840,000 blocks are mined. Each block size is 16.07 GB.

After that, the next 840,000 blocks will attract a reward of 25 LTC per block mined. The reward per block is divided by half every time the 840,000 block goal is reached.

The total number of Litecoin that exists is 56,281,888. Once that number of tokens are circulation, Litecoin mining will stop. So, now is the right time to get into LTC as it’s still relatively profitable.

Litecoin uses the Scrypt hash algorithm for its consensus, which often favors the use of high speed RAM devices as against just raw power. So, your Litecoin mining hardware has to be one that favors this more.

While it was possible to profitably mine Litecoin using graphics processing units, that’s no longer the case. The introduction of Scrypt based ASIC miners has rendered the GPU method obsolete.

Litecoin mining hardware are a better option and will produce more financial rewards for you than using the regular graphics card. Let’s examine the best 2018 Litecoin mining hardware available.

Best Litecoin Mining Hardware For 2018

One of the mistakes that beginners make is buying older Litecoin ASIC miners because they are cheaper.

Well, that’s not a smart move as many of the older models are often lacking in the competitive edge that will help you turn a profit. Newer Scrypt based ASIC mining models tend to be more energy efficient, and high output based.

While there are very few Litecoin miners, the best so far is Bitmain’s Antminer L3+. If Bitmain sounds familiar, that’s because they are the largest bitcoin miner manufacturer in the world. They have also started producing ASIC miners for select altcoins like ethereum and Litecoin.

Antminer L3+ is currently considered the world’s fastest and energy efficient miner. Each unit costs about $850, has a hash rate of 504 Mh/s, and power usage of 800 watts. It also needs to be bought with the APW5 power supply unit.

The downside to Antminer L3+ is the noise it generates –most crypto mining hardware are loud anyway- and the need for a fan to keep the device cool. One more thing with this LTC miner is that, since it is a Scrypt based miner, you can easily use it to mine other Scrypt based cryptos.

Every LTC mining hardware comes with pre-installed software, thus making it very easy to set up and run. There’s really no need for any external software.

How Profitable Is Litecoin Mining?

With bitcoin mining becoming more competitive and less rewarding, smart miners are switching their attention to altcoins like Litecoin to make more profit.

But doing this requires a little thinking. Sure, you can mine Litecoins by yourself, but the best approach for max profitability is pool mining.

Or… you can just buy multiple Antminer L3+ units and start your own mining pool. The point is your profits go up in direct proportion to the number of LTC mining hardware that you have.

How To Mine Litecoin User Guide Conclusion

Of course, with many switching to Litecoin, the hash rate and computational power has become increasingly difficult. But it’s still not comparable to bitcoin’s, which is why there’s no better time to invest in LTC mining than now. The potential for profit is huge given the future potential/trajectory, so you might want to get in on it as soon as possible.