Bitcoin Forum

I didn't see a thread on here yet devoted to this and it is a topic I think we need to get into more.

So we all know that Litecoin GPU mining is possible now.  I've been getting up to 270kh of speed with a 5850.  There seems to be a ton of bugs, and the software is unusable to many people/video cards.  The release of reaper seemed a lot like CoinHunter blowing the whistle on Litecoin, so I'm very pessimistic that this will be updated or shared with the general public.

I think it would be a good idea to set up a bounty (if one doesn't already exist) for someone to build a good useable Litecoin GPU miner.  Regardless if Bitcoin is more profitable right now, we shouldn't ignore this.  If the option exists, and there is interest in it, than we should start talking about it and start making plans about Litecoin's future for the LTC miner now. I'd rather we stick to speculating for Coblee's thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64239.0

Let's try to discuss technical details/setup about GPU mining and express interest/disinterest in mining with a GPU.

LTC main grace was that it was CPU based mining you could do while GPU mining.  Maybe the main reason of this thread is one of the things that has been devaluing LTC recently as it can't compete against BTC as a GPU miner as it offers nothing new and that the price drop is due to the hoarders getting rid of their stocks now it's turning into a GPU coin  ???

I have 25,000 LTC and if it turns into a gpu coin i'll sell :(

There's a couple of threads on the front page discussing the topic of GPU and litecoin and each has had pretty active discussion. It's a pretty big deal since litecoin is supposed to be CPU-only.

GPU mining seems very neat now, 'cause you are generating a whole bunch of litecoins quickly and easily, but it doesn't balance out.

I just don't see how making it easier to generate litecoins is going to help anyone, all I see it doing is making the currency worth a lot less than it is now.

So, that being said, WHY DO U THINK WE NEED A GPU MINER?

As an experiment - How about you put those new litecoins you made from using a GPU miner up as a bounty for it.

Then wait till hell freezes over for someone to do it.

The money is just not there for someone to put the effort in. The person who wrote reaper did just enough to put some doubt into the ltiecoin community, and you will probably see no more developments beyond that, as reaper had its intended effect.

oh, and look at the post above me for an example of what will happen if GPU mining comes in vogue

Litecoin is now a coin that can be mined by gpu. That is reason enough. If the longevity of Litecoin is now effected, I'd like to know. On the other hand, if the first people to gpu mine get an advantage great! I doubt it, and there isn't enough money in it to be more than a topic of curiosity.  This is a money market no matter how you look at it for most of us.

Yes, everything you state is true, this is a money market that is hopefully full of saavy people that will realize what gpu mining could potentially do to this currency.

What I am trying to get across is:

You would be silly to mine litecoins with your gpu when you can make more with bitcoins right now. Also, Flooding the market with GPU mined litecoins isn't going to drive the price of litecoins up as far as I know.

And yes, you can probably pay someone to make a GPU miner - but they are not going to take litecoins. Hell, as demonstrated by the reaper miner, there could already be GPU miners in use that aren't being distributed.

We have the big issue of the currency being developed to be complementary to bitcoin and not a competitor for GPU usage ... Now that it is a competitor, how is that going to affect things?

I'm not against the bounty for a fully functional gpu miner, I just don't see any good to come out of it.

I don't see any value to being an early adopter of GPU mining with a currency with the current value of litecoin.

edit: I could be just being all doom and gloom here though. I would love for someone to brighten up my outlook on litecoin gpu mining :( Also, need to do some more reading on the efficiency factor.

Using your GPU to mine LTC is only occasionally profitable. Bitcoin will most always be more profitable.

And remember, reaper was released by a fan of the opposing chain, solidcoin. Also they did not release the "good" one which supposedly gets 30% more hashes.

I'm still stumped why the LTC community did not make one first. Someone in the LTC community needs to take the reigns and get people motivated.

I see the point many people are bringing up about it damaging the system, but Litecoin is NOW a GPU coin that is more profitable on CPU for the time being.  GPU mining has been done, and now Litecoin needs to adapt and change it's plan.  Even if it isn't profitable now, the ability is still there for when or if it does become a more viable currency.  I was hoping we could all use this thread to start talking about getting better miners more than "should we" because if it can be done, it will, and someone will use that to hurt the community to either 51% it or purposely fuck the economy.

I like Litecoin and want to see it thrive, but I REALLY don't want to turn a blind eye to this because I don't want it to happen.

Scrypt-Litecoin miner can't be that fast as Bitcoin, so 7970 has unreacheble theoritacal maximum of 1200 kh/s
To attack network you need 51% this means with this rate someone has to have Farm of 50+ 7970.
Is it possible to attack well costy :)
5870 has unreachable maximum at 500 kh/s :) and so on.
At this time it's not worth to attack chain, I think releasing good Scrypt GPU-miner will even strngth network and make it more Valuable.

You shouldn't care about 51% from GPU miners, the chain can be EASY! attacked by botnet.
if a middle botnet node can give 10kh/s you need just 5000+ nodes! it's just TINY! botnet.
So i think Scrypt-GPU-miner is even good for LTC not bad, more hashrate so even better protection of a chain.

P.S. LTC miners and Bitcoin miners on GPU not that competative, LTC-scrypt miner performs on Nvidia about the same as on AMD.
the second thing, only really "special" cards give very big performance, like 7970, 7950, 6990, GT590 and so on.

@OP: You didn't look very hard at these boards.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64239.0

LTC has always been minable by GPU. It is just not profitable to do so.

Try to be smarter than a Soiledcoin-sockpuppet please.

I like Litecoin and want it to prosper too.  I think it's future if it become more profitable may be in very low power ARM CPU farms if it can be kept more efficient on CPU than GPU.  Like the £25 RaspberryPi at 5W if it can get >5kH/s? for 5W with good well tuned mining software.  Or it's future as being mined as a screensaver or just in the background while a PC is being used but there is nothing to spend them on.  If a game that mines LTC in the background is invented that could be its killer app to make it mainstream?

To me this seems like a way to get people to move there gpus away from bitcoins so others can jump in ... but i am also doubtful that GPU mining will be at all effective at the current litecoin exchange rate ... unless people don't care if it takes forever to pay for their power

I made this thread to talk about HOW to GPU mine Litecoins more than why should we.  I know it was usable as a gpu miner previously, but 9kh vs. 700 is quite a difference!

If you spent time reading this thread, you will have seen I wrote down the exact URL you posted in the first post.  Are we trolling  ::)?

Also, don't bring up SC.  This is a thread about Litecoin GPU mining.

You clearly did not read that thread. The last 4 pages are nothing but posts how to GPU mine LTC.
Please read existing threads before you clutter the boards with new ones duplicating existing content.

LiteCoin was different in that it was said to only be efficiently mined on a CPU, so anyone with a CPU could mine them without competing with Radeon Farms. Now it's only saving grace it that the blocks are solved 4 times as frequently as Bitcoins, thus making confirmations for transactions faster.

If anything, Litecoin will become an exchange medium , as there are 4 times as many of them and they confirm faster, and bitcion will become the yardstick for all other crypto-currencies. They will be far too valuable and slow to spend in the future, providing it perseveres. 

Is there really an advantage to mining Litecoin with GPU+CPU over mining Bitcoin+Litecoin with GPU+CPU?

not at current LTC prices

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64239.0

Litecoin  is pointless as a gpu coin

How blind are you?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64239.0

It wasn't a thread meant to talk about why we should or shouldn't GPU mine.  I wanted to start a thread more about the hardware/technical aspects of actually doing it.  Figuring out software and what we would need to do it.  Seems like there isn't an interest and a somewhat negative vibe towards all of this. If everyone is that pissy towards discussing this than just let this thread die, or I can lock it or whatever. 

I think the OP is right when he says that another thread was needed.
Coblee's thread was intended for discussion on Litecoin development. Yet it is getting "spammed" with too many "I can't get the GPU miner to work, what should I do?" posts, that don't belong in there.

First of all we need open sourced miner, so we could see the algorithm which they used to achive such performance, after all we could mine using nvidia cards,this would lead us to 2 different markets,using 2 different gpu, question is,what will be the performance.

This might be a good thing if those of us with NVidia cards lying around could be on par with a uber-CPU setup without being a sellout to Radeon Farms. My Core 2 Duo gets about 6khash while I'm using and can go up to 11 when the stars are right, while I have a GT335m that could totally pull some decent weight. Course, if NVidia is viable, that might make Amazon Mining a feasible reality, and then who knows what will happen?

I'm really curious to see what can be done. If someone really spends some quality time on this I'm sure we'll see a lot of change in the Litecoin value.  Ups and downs like we haven't seen. It is a great test to see how well supported Litecoin will be.

Problem is, there is no skilled openCL programmer willing to do this development in open source way.

Seems that no one wants to try it...  :(

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55038.msg656798#msg656798

raw hashing speed on an rPI, this should be halved for bitcoin mining; no idea how it translates to litecoin.

still trying to find whether it is an alpha or beta board that the test was run on.

EDIT: oops, missed the URL - http://elinux.org/RPi_Performance

marked

Maybe the future can be something like that:

* Bitcoin Mining moves to FPGA/ASIC;
* GPU Mining moves to Litecoin;
* Litecoin CPU mining dies...

Can be?!

Can GeistGeld and so on also be GPU mined?

Can they be merged mined with Litecoins?

-MarkM-

Geistgeld uses the same algorithm as bitcoin and can be GPU mined with standard bitcoin gpu mining software.

For this same reason, geistgeld cannot be merged mined with litecoin.

Oh I thought it was one of the CPU ones. Well then I meant the others, I cant even remember their names, wasn't one of them by the same guy who did GiestGeld? That is probably how I thought it was one of them.

-MarkM-

Yes, lolcust who started geistgeld started the CPU friendly "tenebrix", from which "fairbrix" and "litecoin" were derived.

I could be wrong, but it looks like similar straight-forward and simple, yet breaking/forking changes as were done for namecoin, etc. would enable the CPU-based chains to be merged-mined. Coordinating changes for these chains could be seen as difficult because of their low profile, or perhaps it could be seen as simple because the low interest level allows you to overpower the chain with your fork.

You shouldnt forget that main thoughts of any p2p currency is that everyone is equal,and everyone can start,so when btc will go to asic it will be very easy to shut it down,all you have to do is to close the fabric.
But it is interesting to think of gpu in cpu because it should have access to cpu cache which means, it will have very high speed and low latency memory.
But all we need right now is skilled openCL developer, who is ready to do some job and share it with the community.
Couse at the moment I dont get how they are getting the performance they do.

Close the ASIC factory?! Are you serious ???

There are many reasons why factory could be close,when we are talking about ecurrency,when it stops to be profitable\los of interest.Then what?
where are you going to get hardware to support system when existent hardware will get broken? Open new factory costs money.

On the SC wiki page, the Reaper Linux X64 link is broken.

I downloaded source but didn't find instruction for compilation.

Anyone know the procedure?

I'm getting my laptop to mine LTC while mining BTC on my other PC (The one with the decent GPU in it) so that I can ensure that I can at least profit in 1 way or another (by diversifying my e-curency portfolio).I tried reaper gpu miner but it's always stuck on 'compiling kernel..this could take up to 2 minutes'. Any ideas why? I can CPU mine LTC on the laptop,just not GPU as well.Oh well.Are there other GPU miners for LTC?

Seems like Reaper could be optimized more and possibly made more user friendly.

Once this is done or another GPU mining setup for litecoin comes along is when the network has rate will grow much much larger. Until then this will be a bottleneck for some entering the market/network.

Yeah,tell me about it.It seems odd for those who struggle as they'll miss out (for a while then they'll be on par eventually) but can be very rewarding for those who are able to get their heads around it.Anyhow,are there other miners or is reaper my only choice for LTC mining? I tested out the latest beta.It doesn't work,it just shows a bunch of lines then quits again.Maybe I should try it on my PC (as it has the 'right' kinda GPU for it to run) when I get the chance.

To my knowledge Reaper is the only publicly available litecoin GPU mining software. There maybe others that people haven't released yet, but thats just speculation.

Prior to the recent insane jump in value of LTC on the market and the following incredible ramp up in difficulty, it has occurred to me that perhaps we need to think again about the idea of making Litecoin GPU resistant.

At the moment the incredible jump in value of LTC is in a purely speculative capacity, and the resulting number of miners with GPU's getting involved, threatens to destroy long-term "ownership" in the Coin as it will be come far more difficult to mine much faster then the user base expands.

At the moment, to be honest, LTC is in its infancy- there is virtually no infrastructure developed yet to enable true commerce using LTC, yet it's value is attracting so much hash power that it's fast becoming worthless to CPU mine- regardless of the fact that GPU mining on BTC is an order of magnitude greater, it can still be enough to make mining with a CPU impossible.

The reason why modifying the script to be GPU resistant would be important is that it is much easier to acquire substantial GPU hash power then it is to acquire CPU power (with the exception of bot-nets). Your average, even top end computer, will generally have max. 1 cpu chip (with multiple cores). While the same average computer can house many GPU cards. The barrier to multiplying ones CPU power vis-a-vis requiring a complete system to run a CPU is much higher then multiplying ones GPU power. With GPU'S  enterprising individuals can concentrate hashing power significantly and quite quickly.

It is my opinion that for LTC to serve as a functional alternative to BTC (and have a future as a functional currency in any capacity) it is important that vast numbers of individuals are able to contribute and participate meaningfully in the process of mining. While of course the answer that most people will first arrive at is 'the increase in power helps to secure the network against attacks' I believe there is a real danger that while securing the network against attacks we may be simultaneously walling LTC off from widespread adoption, and thus it's long term potential and usefulness as a currency.

Perhaps you are right. But it's not like we can have an "off" switch that disallows miners from coming into the market to mine litecoins. The driving factor is probably price and that once again you can't limit the rate or amount that which people want to buy/sell LTC.

There is no solution that is pragmatic (programmable) to put into the litecoin source code.

That's just the way it is...

I don't see an issue with GPU mining period.

MOST computers have a PCI's slot, and you can easily run a 5850 on a 340 OEM PSU (Think HP DC7100.)

Also, miners are DUMPING GPUs already looking to cash in on ASICs, so buy up.

I kinda look at Litecoin as sloppy seconds if these ASIC do hit the market.

I think it's a question of short term profitability versus long term longevity. It's a reasonable question to discuss for the pros/cons.