I have recently started mining Litecoin with my three R9 290s which is generating about 1 coin per day (circa £18 at the current price). I was just curious to see who else is mining Litecoin and what sort of gains they were getting? Based on the current difficulty, it seems there are reasonable profits to be made. I was looking at the idea of adding more cards to my rig, but it's hard to predict future profitability of mining. Any thoughts?
Yup I've done a bit with my milk crate rigs money to be made for sure 290s aren't great for it, a bit hot and hungry, though they are not too bad at 825/1000 or something like that for ~800kh/s. I use powered 1x - 16x ribbon cables for quite a few cards on one board and good spacing. Was a bit better when LTC was worth more but has covered my hardware and leccy costs, heating costs have been drastically reduced
Also using crates I have 3 7990s 1 7970 and 1 7950 Been mining for a while... stopped at the wrong time and started again when the prices boomed Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk
I've dabbled a bit as a hobbyist but the GTX 470 that i have is never going to earn me anything with it's massive power consumption and 170Khs rate. Did it mostly out of interest in the process. I have bought a couple of coins on the off-chance they soar in value in the future but i won't be putting all my pennies in crypto. Had a go at bitcoin mining a couple of years ago when mining with consumer hardware was still viable, boy do I wish i had stuck with it.
I'm really intrigued by this, but is it really profitable? you say you have 3 R9 290's that's £1000 before you start, if your rig draws say 500W that's going to cost you around £1.80 per day, it's going to take you about 2 months to cover the cost of the graphics cards, assuming the rest of your rig costs another £300, that's another 2 and a half weeks. So after about 3 months you stand to make about £250 assuming the mining rate and price stays the same.... I guess that makes it worth doing.... maybe I'll have to investigate this further....
That's why you buy up all the cheap 7950s etc months back the 290s are just nice for 4k gaming at reasonable speed and can mine when you are doing other things.
I would have owned this hardware for gaming anyway. But if it can make me some cash while it's not otherwise doing anything, then it seems worthwhile. At current statistics, my rig is capable of mining around £18 worth of coins per day.
Do also remember that the hardware can be sold on eBay when you are done to recover a large portion of the costs. And, on top of that it has mostly eliminated my need for central heating, so I am saving a considerable amount of money on gas. Personally I am mining alt coins and trading on cryptsy for BTC/LTC, finding it far more profitable than straight mining LTC, if you set up auto trading it also takes no time on your part.
okay, this has really got my interest, I've got a load of old hardware (probably not the best place to start but beggars can't be choosers) and a power meter thingy. I'm going to set up what I've got and see if I can cover the cost of the electric and then go from there... I'm really interested to find out if this is sustainable if not profitable on a small scale.
I've mined 5 coins in about 2 weeks when they were easier. Used a couple of old rigs (7950x2, 660tix2 560tix2) on wemineltc pool. Stopped after xmas as the ammount of leccy used would start eating into the credit I have with Eon. Where can I flog the buggers and cash out? I can't find any reliable sites.
Depends what you have to flog. Most coins are just used to trade to bitcoin. ( On which 90% of the price is based at the moment) Theres a few trade sites in the uk that will trade bitcoin to cash. Not so sure on the Litecoin options though.
Yeah LTC to BTC and then sell the BTC is probably your best choice. Cryptsy for the first bit and then there are loads of exchanges for BTC conversion.
sorry for the dumb question here, but what work is actually being done?? i did some seti and folding years ago, but i cant find any info on what your machine is actually doing to earn these coins
It's not folding or anything useful for humanity - put it that way. I thought it was basically solving math problems.
Probably helping to break encryption protocols for the NSA All of these 'crypto currencies' are basically doing large hashing calculations and then checking them I think?
Put insanely simply and bypassing juicy nerdy details: If you've got a £1 coin in your hand and walk into a shop you can only exchange (spend) that £1 once. In theory, the shop keeper knows that the £1 is yours to spend, and you can only spend a total of £1 - no one is being defrauded and everything is cool. However with bitcoin, it's digital - so what stops you from sending me 1 btc, and sending someone else that same 1btc -- effectively printing your own money? What even says that the 1btc you 'spent' was even yours? The answer is the network collectively "works out" whether your transaction was valid or not. If it's decided to be valid (you weren't doing anything dodgy), it becomes confirmed, and the transaction is complete and gets added to the public list of transactions that happened (the block chain, in bitcoin parlance) But what stops you from becoming a majority on the network and influencing it in order to validate all of your fraudulent transactions? Easy: validating transactions has to be made extremely difficult, so that the amount of effort you'd need to expend in order to be successfully fraudulent isn't worth it. It's a Proof of work system So the "work being done" is validating transactions (which is searching for hashes of blocks which meet certain criteria) - and as it's hard work, the result is a reward in bitcoins... which also happens to be the only way to mint new bitcoins.
LTC can be sold directly on eBay if you wish, or what I have done personally is trade for BTC on Cryptsy (or BTC-E if you wish) and then transfer them to localbitcoins and sell them for cold hard cash transferred through a bank transfer. Depending how badly you want to cash you may wish to consider holding on as the price will likely rise.
I'm trying to decide whether to exchange my Litecoins for Bitcoins, or hang on to them for a while and see if their value increases.
