Over the last year I have had countless people in the tech world ask about the mining of algorithmic currency. These last months the interest has reached a level that is quite amazing. In one of the last meetings of the algorithmic currency “rocket scientists” group ( a mastermind group), the dozens of people on the call brought in by two Silicon Valley VCs asked quite a number of questions about the details of algorithmic currency mining and the details of mining rigs. Most of the people on the call have seen specialized ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) Bitcoin Miners. However, few understood the way Litecoin was mined and what the miners look like.
At one point Bitcoin could be profitably mined on a computer’s CPU and later on using the Graphic’s card (GPU) on the computer but the specific way Bitcoin is mined tilted to the development of ASIC designed specifically for Bitcoin mining.
Litecoin was designed to limit the usefulness of ASICs. There are a few ways ASICs could increase the productivity of Litecoin mining but there are technical limits. The creators of Litecoin saw the Bitcoin mining community was in what is called the “arms race” to find faster and faster mining rigs. This has the prospect of overly centralizing mining and Bitcoin confirmations into a smaller group then the apparent intention of the Bitcoin creators. Thus Litecoin has tried to address this issue by making the mining of Litecoin profitable enough for smaller operators. I might add that Bitcoin has once again become very profitable to mine for a smaller operation with the right ASICs as the price reaches above the conversion into $1,000. Just about all of the algorithmic currencies that are not Bitcoin are based on the Litecoin model.
The Coins Are In The Scrypt
Litecoin is in the place that Bitcoin was about 14 months ago. Thus I am not surprised that during the last call with these VCs there was a tremendous amount of questions about exactly Litecoin is mined.
Most miners work in groups called pools and share the hashing and share the resulting coins that are mined. It sounds far more complex then it is in practicality as the software and pooled mining sites do most of the work.