i'd say it has more to do with them being absolutely ABYSMAL in the desktop CPU market the past few years....

their highest end chips are barely competing with friggin core i3's that use like 1/3rd the power (i have a i3 3225 that barely uses 25 watts at full load...)

Difficulty went up IMO BECAUSE of price

I've done some thinking on this lately.. and essentially i can see one of three things happening:

1. A large % of miners just quit, sell their gear and move on (unlikely IMO)
2. A large % of miners move to LTC, shooting up its difficulty to the point that it is equally profitable as BTC AFTER the halving/asics, after this initial jump a lot of people would back away, as if it wasn't profitable to mine BTC, why mine LTC?
3. A large % of miners move to LTC, shooting up difficulty AND shooting up USD and BTC price, this would help to solidify LTC as a viable alternative/'silver' and give GPU miners a home post ASICs.

Now as one that has some LTC in the wallet.. I hope #3 comes to pass (and because it would nice to keep profitably mining for awhile).

Before the difficulty adjustment today LTC mining for immediate selling WAS FAR more profitable.

For example, on my rig with two 7770's... 390 khash or 440 mhash...

when difficulty was 16 it was about $2.05/day for LTC and $1.75/day for BTC.

Go back to when difficulty was 11 and you can see just how profitable it would have been.

But.. of course now that difficulty has gone up, immediate term mining is now favoring BTC in most cases, but if you feel that LTC/BTC is going to improve then you'd still want to mine LTC as if it goes up to .01 or .015 sometime then it be well worth the while to mine now (or even better to buy some coins).

I am curious what the BTC halfing/asics will do though.. it could get interesting or ugly.

just a LOT more people mining litecoins these days.

Its jump in value made it FAR more valuable to mine than bitcoins for a couple of weeks, it has almost leveled off with the latest difficulty increase and will likely be on par with the next 11% difficulty increase estimated in about 3 days.

I would imagine that even if someone was trying to sell.. on ebay, craigslist etc.. they'll still mine every last coin than they until they get the price they want.

honestly.. LTC mining is stupidly profitable right now (with current difficulty, fx rate, etc). a single 7950 ($320 on amazon) nets about .25-.3 btc/day when mining ltc.

however... those glory days are ending in a hurry and it'll quickly eqaulize out to what BTC mining is worth due to natural market forces.

woah.. you mean that you get the coins the SAME day? I figured you'd have to wait several business days like most ACH transfers.

I picked up a 7770 the other day ($90 after MIR, couldn't pass it up lol)..

Some notes: It appears that core speed is mostly irrelevant, for example, 1000mhz core is the same hash rate as 1200mhz, just crank up mem speed to the max and you should be set..

Hash speed in cgminer/bfgminer is... weird. 5 second average always tends to be on the low side, showing at 185 each... however when I look at the pool.. it shows about 220-230 each.

\

ya man... reaper ALONE uses 2.8 gigs for 2x 7950's.

go order a 2x4gb ram set and you'll be set


cgminer on two 7770's uses about 50mb... so ya.. its something about reaper that just requires a bit of ram.

once you get it working fine though... you'll get a nice hash rate.. i'm getting 1220khash from my 2x 7950 system.

if you are using CGminer those are hardware errors.. essentially the computer is not doing the work properly.

First you need to tell us what cards you are using.

this would make sense, as I can't imagine there being a whole lot of data needing to be transported between the card and the system.

however I DO wonder what the heck reaper is doing with the 2.9gb of system ram it hogs.. lol

ya.. the 7990 is a pretty bad value for mining.

however if you wanted max performance and could ONLY run 1 card no matter what.. i guess then its OK.

1 share = ~4.3 billion hashes
currently difficulty = avg # of shares needed to find a block

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ya.. tacotime is partly to blame... him and his helpful guides/posts getting all the noobs on board.... (just kidding man..)

but ya, difficulty is just going to go up and up from here as the BTC mining environment gets less and less friendly for a GPU miner and heck.. who doesnt like getting 100ltc/day vs 0.6btc/day

After lots of testing with many different settings.. i would suggest this for the OP


avoid the 7870 if you are considering buying one for LTC mining

No matter how many attempts I have made with all types of different settings: I have NEVER been able to get above 330 khash on it, even at 1220/1425 clock speeds. I am easily getting 610-640 on a 7950, and considering the 7950 is only about $60 or so more than a 7870, it's not the best bang/buck by a long shot.

(that said.. 50ltc bounty for the first guy that can get me 400+ khash out of a 7870)

I wonder if something like that would work for reaper (changing up the syntax for it's desired arguments of course)

sell!

The difficulty needs all the help it can get to not go up any higher

yup. GPU-z reports a total of like 40mb of ram used between BOTH my 7950's when btc mining.

3gb total used (1.5 each) for LTC mining

So on the LTC side... litecoinpool.org has a "mobile web" version of its API. Essentially what this does it shows, in a VERY mobile friendly form (just a weblink, no login required) of the stats like hash rate, unearned rewards etc.

I then am able to use the android "meta widget" app to capture this data and put it on my phone as a widget.

this is SO immensely useful and I can't imagine it taking too much effort to implement.

Please pool operators. Do the community a favor and implement a  web-based api viewer for your pools?

(oh, and if there is a generic api-viewer app/website out there, let me know, as some will let you see the raw data in webpage form, but it's a bit more of a pain when not in user-friendly format)

Cheers!