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

See the Litecoin Association's introductory video to Litecoin.

Just like its older brother Bitcoin, Litecoin is an online network that people can use to send payments from one person to another.Litecoin is peer-to-peer and decentralized, meaning that it is not controlled by any single entity or government.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: or LTC).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.

Instead of having one central authority that secures and controls the money supply (like most governments do for their national currencies),Litecoin spreads this work across a network of miners.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 producea 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 11,856,949.

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 fora CPU,a GPU andan 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 areLitecoinTalk.ioand the /r/litecoinand /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.

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.

Choosing a mining pool can be a very personal decision, and several factors should be taken into consideration,including features, reliability, reputability, and user support.

ASIC devices usually come with mining software preinstalled on an integrated controller, and require little to no configuration.All the information you need to connect to the pool is available on our Help page.

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 should 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.

See more here:

Beginner's Guide | litecoinpool.org