Litecoin pool mining howto
Leave the password blank. Even with free electricity the profits are so small that they are hardly worth the effort. Before you can start to mine you need to create a wallet. Although Litecoin is a digital asset, you still need a place to store them. This is done in a digital wallet.
There are multiple methods to obtain a wallet which vary by ease of use and the security they provide. Exodus is the a desktop multi-asset wallet with built in ShapeShift support for converting between crypto-currencies. The application is comfortable to use available for Windows, macOS and Linux. One of the best features of this multi-currency wallet the client-side encryption of your private keys which means you stay in full control of your keys which never leave your machine in unencrypted form.
A hardware wallet is a special type of wallet which stores the user's private keys in a secure hardware device. Hardware wallets offer robust safety features for storing cryptographic assets and securing digital payments. Popular hardware wallets are the Ledger Nano S and the Trezor. Another possibility is to create a wallet at LiteVault. Please make sure to immediately backup your wallet keys after creating a wallet. We recommend using a password store such as KeePass or 1Password for that. For long-term storage of Litecoin you can create a paper wallet.
A paper wallet is extremely secure if you guard your private key by storing it in a password vault such as KeePass or LastPass or printing it out and depositing the sheet in a real bank vault. There are multiple digital currency exchanges you can register with. The payment system does not handle physical currencies, like the dollar or the euro; instead, it uses its own unit of account, which is also called litecoin symbol: This is why you will often see Litecoin categorized as a virtual or digital currency.
Litecoins can be bought and sold for traditional money at a variety of exchanges available online. 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.
Miners assemble all new transactions appearing on the Litecoin network into large bundles called blocks , which collectively constitute an authoritative record of all transactions ever made, the blockchain. The way Litecoin makes sure there is only one blockchain is by making blocks really hard to produce. So instead of just being able to make blocks at will, miners have to produce a cryptographic hash of the block that meets certain criteria, and the only way to find one is to try computing many of them until you get lucky and find one that works.
This process is referred to as hashing. The miner that successfully creates a block is rewarded with 25 freshly minted litecoins. 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 9,, Litecoin mining can be profitable, but only under certain conditions.
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.
Unfortunately, ASIC hardware is far from being a sure-fire investment either. Potential buyers should be extremely careful, as various elements should be considered:. Good starting points are LitecoinTalk. Don't feel like investing in expensive hardware? Not everyone needs to be a miner. In fact, the easiest way to get started with Litecoin is to buy some at an exchange.
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: 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.