Bitcoin Forum

I knew about bitcoin back in 2012 when the price went from virtually zero to $30 then back down to $3 but I never really did anything with it. Now I understand that you need a really good graphics card or specialized ASIC mining equipment to even mine a single bitcoin. So I decided to look into alt-coins to get my head around this whole cryptocurrency thing. I'm not looking into making a profit or anything. So anyway, I set up a dogecoin wallet a day or two ago and got 1.7 dogecoin from a dogecoin faucet. Neat.

However syncing seems to be very slow. It takes hours. About half an hour ago I started up the dogecoin program again and it said "out of sync". Ten minutes ago, it was at 7760 blocks remaining. Now it says 7730 blocks remaining.

Next I tried kittehcoin. I was looking into joining a mining pool but decided to try the built-in miner to see how many coins I could get. I've been running the thing for over two hours but haven't managed to mine a single coin yet. It says that I'm getting 500 hashes a second which seems quite low because I hear of people online getting upwards of 1,000,000 hashes per second.

My computer is a netbook with a 1.66 GHz single-core Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM, Intel integrated graphics, and Windows XP. I understand that kittehcoin is a scrypt-based so a state-of-the-art graphics card is not needed and a CPU should work just fine.

So what's going on here? Is my hardware too weak? Do I need to join a pool for anything to happen?

For SCRYPT mining you need a powerful graphics card, preferably a Radeon 7950 or Radeon R9 290. You are wasting electricity mining on your netbook.
There is nothing you can mine on your netbook that would be profitable, not even the CPU only coins. You are probably spending more on electricity
than you will ever earn from coins.

Change your hardware. See this: http://www.cryptobadger.com/build-your-own-litecoin-mining-rig/ (http://www.cryptobadger.com/build-your-own-litecoin-mining-rig/)

I'd be interested if there were a rig you could build for way cheaper than that.  Right now I'm running a Nvidia GTX 660m card getting about 55k, plus some Azure servers.  I would prefer to invest like 200 dollars and actually have a decent hash rate.

Didn't someone mine thousands of bitcoins back in the early days on an old Pentium 4? I can understand how you might need a good GPU to mine litecoins and maybe dogecoins since their difficulty is quite high because of their popularity but surely something as tiny as kittehcoin should be mineable on a normal PC?

Unfortunately, this is not the case. A few years ago the number of people mining bitcoin was much much smaller. Now everyone is trying to make a quick buck by mining some coins. So your so called 'tiny' kittehcoin is not so tiny. See this: https://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison (https://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison)

And then do some math to figure out when you will get a block: https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc (https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc) (Plug in your coins difficulty and your hashrate to see how long it will take for you to generate a block)

Or just use this if it has your coin already listed: http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency (http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency) (It does't have kitteh coin)

i'm using 2 radeon 6870's and they get anywhere from 150-250 khash/s on each using scrypt.

I think the cheaper ones are in the 200 range.

OK, thanks for that. I plugged the numbers in and it says that with the kittehcoin difficulty at 2.6 and 500 hashes per second, it will take me 260 days to find a block. :(

Your hardware is not too weak anyways Dogecoin mining was a nice deal but Kittehcoin is the new deal by now.