Bitcoin Forum

whats more profitable atm?

I'm mostly ignorant about LTC.  However, BTC is at $164 now.  I find it hard to believe LTC is more profitable than BTC, especially when you have to have that memory ramped up to be effective.

M

http://dustcoin.com/mining

LTC has been more profitable for the last 14 months except for about 2 weeks cumulatively where it dipped into the 90 percents.

the exact same hashing power will get you 1.88 BTC if you mine LTC and sell it in the same amount of time you will mine 1 BTC if you just mine it directly.

It is hard to comprehend how profitable LTC mining would have been for one that ONLY mined it say the last 6 months with even just 3 mh/s and never sold their stash.

hang on - really? 1btc mined directly, but 1.88 btc if ltc is mined and sold to btc? ...huh.

People with BTC who sell for LTC.

Keep in mind that a card doing 700MH/s doing BTC may not get 700KH/s doing LTC.  Some cards are just better than others for doing certain cryptos.  My 7970s make more BTC for me than doing LTC since I can't get them to 720KH even with Tacotime's settings and it uses a lot more energy to crank out a measly 600KH/s.

I couldn't find too many metrics regarding scrypt performance.

It's an interesting challenge. I'm putting together a 4 ghz i5 miner with 16gb at least 1600MHz tied to two 7950's. It'll be interesting to see what rates I get. From most of the reports I've read it's from people switching weak-cpu GPU miner systems to scrypt, so I'm really interested to see what some serious memory bandwidth will do for me.

16 gb of ram is not going to do anything, we are talking VRAM.

LTC mining is like the darkside...  :D

The three rigs I put together recently (one 2x7970, one 2x7950, one 2x5750 since I had the extra board lying around) can all produce a stable 2.8GH/s in moderate conditions for BTC.  For LTC, I can sometimes get up to ~2200 KH/s, but I get around 15% stale rate and my drivers and cards crash more often.  So alongside that 15% stale rate I also have around 10% downtime per day (unless I happen to go out and a rig freezes up), so we'll say roughly my one week experiment had me thinking "LTC is more profitable" at first... but at the end of the week I spent more time and frustration and in order to get what I would have with BTC I am sitting waiting for the exchange rate to get a little friendlier.

End of the story, LTC still has growing pains with network and pools, but until large scale ASIC deployments start hitting you can still make some BTC off of your hardware.

Then again, Utopia may strike and BTC maintains a steady price of $300/USD, in which case I'll be buying more hardware. :D

I persisted with the 7970 settings and finally I get 750+ from reference 7970 925 core clock

As long as they are not voltage locked just fiddle with the +/- 10-15% on Tacotimes settings and they will pop

I agree with power usage ...as there is no free lunch with LTC :D

The most profitable play *TODAY 4/15/2013* is buying coins at these prices - not mining hardware.

And yes, LTC is difficult to mine because its very hard on the cards, and getting 24/7 stable settings takes a lot of tweaking/cooling/luck/skill.

Last night I decided to switch to LTC just for fun...  I agree with the above comments that LTC requires more skill/tinkering.  Each of my workers have different success with LTC and BTC -

Better at LTC:  my HD 7750s rip 175 kH/s in LTC but only 150 MH/s in BTC 
                     my CPU (obviously)

Better at BTC:  my CPU-embedded GPU thus far is better at mining BTC (63 MH/s) than LTC (43 kH/s), but I haven't played with the settings on this guy much...  I like the idea of having a little exposure to the BTC (~15% of my "work")

Overall, I'm making about double with the 7750s rippin LTC and I'm still minin' a 'lil BTC for the french-fried effect (Slush is in France, right?)

In summary, its fun to at least try mining each of them and see where you are at.

I think that LTCs profitability lies in it's price.
Let's say you can mine say XLTC/day if you exchange that to BTC it is worth about the same money, depending on difficulty. BUT
What you want to hold when the price start to move upwards?

22 BTC or 1000 LTC?

Last time I traded LTC I bought 400 @ 0.44 USD, and it went up to 4.5$ That is tenfold.
BTC at a price of whatever it is now, ~65$ a pop needs to go to unrealistic highs to get the same return.

I say stick to LTC, because you can hoard more units and and wait for the price to start to climb.

Up until now the price of LTC was depending on BTC heavily. If you look at prices now, it seems that it started to separate from the effects of the BTC price.

@szita2000 Where do you mine btw?

LTC with the current exchange rate is about the same as BTC, maybe worse if you factor in the extra power.

I was on Notroll, but it is not too reassuring that Nickasa don't have enought to pay out measily 10 LTCs, so I tried Give-Me-LTC, but the earnings was dissapointing.
So now I ended up on WeMineLTC.com.
I have to vouch for those guys as the earnings are spot on. If anything I think my earning there is a little higher than Notroll was.
They have the graphs and everything, so it is cool.

What cpu in gpu is this? My i7 hd400 only does 12mh/s.

Slush is Czech and is in Czechnya. Hahah. No, czech republic.

I think you used the wrong quote lol

Its the AMD A8 black edition - got it off craiglist unopened from some lady for $50.  It sells on amazon for $101

Thanks for the tip @szita2000

I was mining with give-me-ltc.com but the hash on their site and within CGminer was super volatile.  Now on their site its steady work and +100 observed kH/s on their site. 

BONUS - 0% pool fee

Currently given the difficulty is rather high, GPU's are doing better at LTC. The only difference is that LTC is harder to configure on most GPU's because you have to try and account for every setting (if you're not using GUIminer or the like).

http://dustcoin.com/mining (http://dustcoin.com/mining)

It really depends on your setup. In most cases LTC will be far better off with the rise in difficulty.

LTC is starting to become independent from BTC.  LTC will eventually be more valuable than BTC in my opinion since the rate of confirmation (usually 6 for btc-e, etc. ) is 15 in versus 60 min. 

The network hash on LTC is also growing. 

 Namecoin looks %7 to btc's %100. Does that mean its bad to mine nmc? :D Or does that mean its %7 more profitable to mine NMC?

I wouldn't mine NMC directly, only merged.  The 7% means you get 7% of what you get by mining NMC as you would putting the same effort into mining BTC.

M

I just did some tests with two of my cards, trying to mine for LTC. Followed the Scrypt readme in cgminer and came to the conclusion that mining for BTC is still more profitable :)

The cards are HD6570 and FD6670. Both peaked with the following settings at 31Kh/s each:

cgminer -T -l 1 --scrypt -I 9 --thread-concurrency 2880 -w 256

Mining Bitcoins, I get 120~130Mh/s from each card.

Following the calculator here:
http://dustcoin.com/mining
I get $0.89 per day mining BTC and only $0.31 from LTC.

Now it is time to test my 7970 and 7870 cards...

Interestingly, I get over 82Kh/s mining on CPU (11 threads, 3930K i7, 4.2GHz)


EDIT: I know what my problem was! I underclocked the memory on both cards to 300MHz for BTC mining. Once I clocked them back up, I stared playing with the intensity and thread-concurrency settings.

HD6570 performed best with -I 17 --thread-concurrency 2880 and 900MHz memory clock, giving me the speed at 98Kh/s.

HD6670 performed best with -I 14 --thread-concurrency 2880 and 1000MHz memory clock, giving me the speed at 104Kh/s.

This changes the picture a lot! Profitability rises from $0.31 to $1.03 per day at today's BTC rate.

EDIT 2: This is getting interesting. Yet another of my HD 6670 cards, showed best performance with -I 16 and gave me 115Kh/s

EDIT 3: The story is different for HD 7970 with memory clock set to 1300MHz. The maximum I managed to get out of it is 404 kH/s (-I 20 --thread-concurrency 8192). This is currently less profitable than mining BTC with the same card @ 650MH/s ($4.88 per day in BTC vs. $4.01 in LTC)