I'd be willing to bet they're going to be quite pricey.

Considering a 7970 is about $450, I would expect it to be $900+

I had posted this in another thread, but I didn't want this information buried in a random thread (which is locked now). Feel free to ask me questions, point out other benefits of Litecoin, point out weaknesses in Litecoin, speak your mind about why you disagree about something in this post, etc... Please only serious intelligent debate... no name calling and dick measuring... thank you.

Litecoin to me is useful and valuable to me in a lot of ways.

1. Diversification of one's cryptocoin portfolio. Someone such as myself that really likes Bitcoin can use other crypto currencies to diversify their crypto portfolio (this valuable trait is not specific to Litecoin.) Age old investing ideology comes into play here and this is just smart investing. Only investing in Bitcoin is like going all in on Google stock.

2. Litecoin being built upon Scrypt makes it stronger than most other ALT currencies, especially the ones that are SHA-256 based. If you look into the problems TRC is facing, you will see that ASICs are hoping on their chain and sending difficulty into the stratosphere. They then go to hash something else, leaving the TRC block chain moving at a snail's pace and transactions taking hours to days to confirm. All SHA-256 based ALT coins (that do not have Scrypt) will suffer from this problem until they are fixed.

3. Litecoin is useful to the crypto currency ecosystem in the way that it's useful to have Visa, MasterCard, and Discover Card... or Wells Fargo, Bank Of America, and Chase. Sure, they all do the same thing, but they all do the same thing a little bit differently. Also, if one were to fail, there are others in existance so all commerce would not screech to a halt across the nation. It is good for Bitcoin to have a competing entity that is similar but not the exact same to itself. For the benefit of free market competition, each currency will always be striving to stay ahead or to catch up to one another, at the end of the day mutually improving both currencies by default.

4. Litecoin confirms in 1/4 the time that Bitcoin does. This one is brought up the most often for obvious reasons. I am sometimes impatient and do not want to wait 10 minutes to a hour+ for one or ten confirmations on the Bitcoin block chain. Although in theory this makes Litecoin 1/4 as secure as Bitcoin, I personally have never suffered any problems using Litecoin. Also, Bitcoiners refute this point by stating Bitcoin will soon be faster as soon as the devs increase the block size (I think this is the method they are trying to use), but it is a lot easier said than done. If it was an easy thing to do, then it would have been done long ago. Litecoin is faster right at this moment, which is valuable to me.

5. Because blocks are found 4x faster, difficulty adjusts more quickly.. about every 3.5 days. This is useful because it controls the rate of the minting of Litecoins, and makes sure that they stay provably scarce for some time to come. Again, this is valuable because it stabilizes the network and deters high powered hashers from shooting difficulty into the sky and then leaving the network at a crawling pace for a longer period of time (than if blocks were solved at the same pace as Bitcoin.) This feature is not all butterflies and fairy tales, it also provides the opportunity to manipulate network speed, but as the network grows this will become less and less of a problem.

6. Then there is the "there's nothing to do with your Litecoins" fallacy. These people just don't do their research, there are plenty of things you can do and buy with Litecoin as of this instant. New merchants and services are popping up everyday, and I think this will continue to happen well into the future.

7. The Litecoin community is growing at an exponential rate. Similar to the growth of Bitcoin, as the community grows then so will Litecoin. Litecoin is already far too big and the people that believe in it are too invested in Litecoin for it to fail at this point. Litecoin can at this point proudly say that they are king of the ALT coins. It can no longer be brushed aside as a scam/pump and dump/whatever, it has real value and people are starting to see that.

8. Like Bitcoin, there was no Litecoin pre mine. There was the genesis block, and 2 blocks to confirm the genesis. This is valuable for obvious reasons... no one wants to support scammers, and for a crypto currency to become highly adopted this is a necessary feature.

9. Not everyone was so lucky to be around when Bitcoin was first started and able to buy them for pennies. The possibility of becoming an "early adopter" is very appealing to new crypto currency users. A ton of "noobs" have recently appeared in the last wave of Bitcoin mania and I've noticed that a lot of them overwhelmingly support and/or already use Litecoins.

10. As Bitcoins become more valuable over time, this will further push the poor and "working class" away from it. Some can no longer afford to buy one Bitcoin even at today's prices. People like to get more for their money, and when buying at today's exchange rate people can get more Litecoins than Bitcoins. If the same services and merchants start accepting Litecoins, then what is the purpose of paying $100+, $200+, or $300+ per bitcoin?

11. Litecoin has the advantage of doing everything after Bitcoin. By sitting and waiting in the shadows for people to bring to light exploits and bugs on Bitcoin, these problems can be fixed before there is much of a problem or before someone exploits it. Bitcoin would obviously be exploited first if there was something to exploit, because of the bigger market cap and it is more valuable for someone to exploit Bitcoin first rather than Litecoin.

12. Litecoin derives its value in the same way that Bitcoin does. It is provably scarce and its value is held up by supply and demand. Bitcoin had proven that this in itself can hold up an economy and even make it thrive. As long as there are new services and merchants accepting Litecoin (as there are), then demand should not go away. And... we all know by now that supply stays constant, thus giving Litecoin value.

13. It's anonymous.


I will be adding to this list in the near future.

Cheers,

Ch

Thanks for the info guys. I definitely learned a lot more about mining bandwidth requirements, and the differences in between get work and stratum protocols when looking into this.

I found out that I can get DSL internet there though, so this is not even a problem anymore. 

It turns out the landlord lied when he said I couldn't get cable internet there. I just checked with the local cable provider and I can.

I guess he doesn't like miners... it's a conspiracy.

/thread

That's what security systems are for.

It's not really out in the boonies, it's in an industrial area about a 5 minute drive from my home. I'm more worried about the internet.  

JML: thanks for you input

   4G Mobile Hotspot
Bandwidth        20.89 mbps / 5.42 mbps (up/down)
Latency           65 ms
Packet Loss      0%
Jitter                10 ms

^ may be outdated... from 2011

Likely speeds:

4g LTE speeds: downloads of up to 5–12 Mbps and uploads of up to 2–5 Mbps

Satellite speeds: downloads of up to 10 Mbps and uploads of up to 3 Mbps

Research around the forums (note: some of this information is outdated... stratum will use less bandwidth):

I'm looking at a warehouse to expand my mining operation. I found one really cheap, but it's kind of on the outside of town so there's no cable/dsl internet.

Has anyone mined on satellite internet or 4g LTE before???

I've always used cable internet, so I have no clue.

Also, it seems most satellite/4g lte internet providers have caps of monthly data usage... like 10Gb/mo, 15Gb/mo, 20Gb/mo

Would these data plans support a large farm of ASICs or GPUs if all I used them to do was hash, no downloading or web surfing??

I know I will be ordering more hardware if they're shipping late may/april.

A 2 module version might be more in my budget, so I hope they make it!

ProfMac seems to be a trust able guy.

I know there are plans of development with this chip (just check this subforum.) Maybe a group buy like this will make said development more likely, so I hope you can get at least one order in for the sake of legit ASIC options.

Good luck!

Also.. this is not a thread to argue about such, let PRof do his thing. Everyone knows you are kind of speculating that someone will develop a controller board or pcb or whatever you need to make these things hash.

Certainly sounds like software/settings issue.

Try using BAMT on that USB stick.

MapleSyrupGhost's guide: http://www.bitcointrading.com/forum/linux-distros/bamt-version-0-5-easy-usb-based-mining-linux-with-farm-wide-management-tools/msg1835/#post_lazylitecoin

I've had no issues using this and usually can have a rig setup and installed in about 15 minutes.

I like to use xrdp to remote in from windows, install it like:
apt-get install xrdp

Remember to change the default password in bamt, otherwise you wont be able to remote in.

Good luck!

Let me give you a couple pointers of things I learned in the aftermath of my group buy.

1. Lay out your terms as specifically as possible
 - How long will you host the devices?
 - What happens when they become unprofitable?
 - Can people transfer interest and what rules are there for this? (I advise against this.. it makes a huge accounting mess as I am learning.)
 - Make sure everyone knows you are not and will not guarantee any profits and each person is investing at their own risk, and that by sending you money to order the Avalons they already understand this.
 - Will you merge mine any coins? which ones?
 - Will you go solo? overclocking?
 - Which pool will you use? (if you do)

2. Go ahead and make some forums somewhere so you can keep everybody up to date and everything organized. Have users PM you on bitcointalk their email they register on the forums with, so that you can verify their identity. Only allow the verified group posting privileges, otherwise spam bots show up.

3. If any extra expenses are required, let it be known (rent/power conditioners/240v PDUs/C13 to C14 cables/electricity to run the A/C, etc).

4. You can use https://github.com/csjones/sharebitcoins to make dividend payments easily.

Just really make sure to think through your terms before collecting money. Also, from experience I think 3% is too low a percentage. I wish I had charged more because it takes a lot of time and effort to manage 87+ investors. Also, you will receive your units much later than I will and difficulty will be higher. Do not get locked into doing this for a penny per month, because you will hate it.

Good luck!

You're blaming them for the volatility of the Bitcoin price?

<facepalm>

--lookup-gap 2 has always crashed cgminer for me using any 5xxx card whether it be *nix or d0ze.

However, -g 1 (--lookup-gap's alternate syntax) has worked on every rig I've ever tried it on, so this might be the issue.

I usually use something along the lines of:

export DISPLAY=:0
export GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS=1
export GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT=100

screen ./cgminer --scrypt -o give-me-ltc.com:8080 -u user -p password --thread-concurrency 8000 -I 18 -g 1 -w 256 --auto-fan --auto-gpu

I agree

Rofl. I like this guy already. That's a good sense of humor you got there.

Good luck in your venture, the ALT coin community needs more exchanges for sustained growth. 

I think they realized it's easier to sell 100,000 chips to one customer than to send a handful of chips to 1000s of customers.

Good for them IMO. 

It sucks they sold out already though for people wanting to pick some up, I'm sure they might sell another batch of these after batch 2/3 ship.

Well... IMO, Bitcoiners are inherently more likely to use Litecoins because they are already well versed in the way that crypto currencies work, making them a prime target market for the expansion of the Litecoin community. The know how to make a paper wallet, they know how to mine, they know how to exchange, etc. They would be able to fit right in immediately.

And of course I'd like to see many new Litecoiners from the general public as well, but to just brush off the largest user base of crypto currencies (Bitcoiners) is a bit absurd.

+1 You've done a lot of work on this since I've last looked. Great job! 

Sorry Simran, but I disagree with this. This would make Litecoin more widely adopted among Bitcoiners, and thus increasing its value exponentially. I think increasing the value of Litecoin would be beneficial to Litecoiners, no?

I think the problem is that this would be very complicated to implement, not only on a technical level, but also because some of the old school bitcoiners/devs might not be agreeable to turning their competitor into their business partner.