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A Beginner's Guide to Litecoin Mining

So you've heard about Litecoin mining and you want to find out more. This page is for you.

What is Litecoin?

See the Litecoin Association's introductory video to Litecoin.


If you already know Bitcoin, Litecoin is very similar, the two main differences being that it has faster confirmation times and it uses a different hashing algorithm.

What is Mining?



Every few days, the difficulty of the criteria for the hash is adjusted based on how frequently blocks are appearing, so more competition between miners equals more work needed to find a block. This network difficulty, so called because it is the same for all miners, can be quantified by a number; right now, it is 14,913,258.

Should You Mine Litecoins?

Litecoin mining can be profitable, but only under certain conditions. In the early days people could make a profit by mining with their CPUs and GPUs, but that is no more the case today. The introduction of specialized mining hardware (commonly referred to as ASICs), which can mine much faster and much more efficiently, has made finding blocks much harder with general-purpose hardware.

If you compare the profitability analyses for a CPU, a GPU and an ASIC, you will see that the costs of CPU and GPU mining largely exceed the rewards, and even with free electricity the profits are so small that they are hardly worth the effort.

Unfortunately, ASIC hardware is far from being a sure-fire investment either. Potential buyers should be extremely careful, as various elements should be considered:

Most importantly: always do your own research, and never trust any single source of information. Good starting points are and the /r/litecoin and /r/litecoinmining subreddits.

Don't feel like investing in expensive hardware? That's fine! Not everyone needs to be a miner. In fact, the easiest way to get started with Litecoin is to buy some at an exchange.

What are Mining Pools?

As we've seen above, finding a block is very hard. Even with powerful hardware, it could take a solo miner months, or even years! This is why mining pools were invented: by sharing their processing power, miners can find blocks much faster. Pool users earn shares by submitting valid proofs of work, and are then rewarded according to the amount of work they contributed to solving a block.

The reward systems used by mining pools can be roughly subdivided into two categories: proportional systems and pay-per-share systems.


What Software to Use?


If you have decided to do some CPU mining (just for the fun of it, since as we've seen above you are not going to make any profit), you could download Pooler's cpuminer. GPU mining is considerably harder to set up, and not much more efficient than CPU mining when compared to ASICs. Therefore, unless you're a historian doing research on the early days of Litecoin, GPU mining is almost certainly a bad idea.