I think it's fairly unreasonable to compare LTC's growth patterns to BTC. The growth it's experienced in the past couple months is directly proportional to the fiat price of BTC, meaning LTC is still being used primarily as a means of buying and selling BTC. We as human beings like to try and identify patterns, but expecting LTC to behave in the same way as BTC because its growth patterns look similar on paper is perhaps a bit rash. I'm not saying LTC won't crash. After all, there's a very real possibility that BTC will crash, and if it does, LTC will almost certainly follow suit. There's also the fact that LTC's difficulty has been increasing exponentially since the recent boom. If LTC's trading price for BTC doesn't increase to reflect the increasing difficulty, it could start to get snubbed in favor of FTC, possibly causing a crash. But I think suggesting it might crash because that's what BTC did in 2011 is a pretty major oversimplification.

I find altcoins to be far too unstable, even the more established ones like LTC. Hence why I'm converting to BTC rather than getting a bunch of altcoins, waiting for an uptick in value, and cashing out to fiat directly. I'm not looking to play the speculation game, I'm just trying to get BTC without needing to purchase them or mine them directly. Perhaps certain altcoins will increase in value over time, but until one of them increases in value independently of BTC, I'm not really interested in investing in any of them as anything other than as a means to get BTC.

Which version of Windows are you using?

FTC may mine faster, but the minimum payout threshold is much higher and it trades at a lot less than LTC. I haven't really looked into DGC yet, though. Maybe I will.


That's pretty handy, thanks.


An old-ish Windows PC with an NVIDIA GPU.

Newbie here. Since I apparently have to post something substantial before getting access, I thought I'd share my current process for acquiring BTC. Since I'm just a hobbyist and wasn't really looking to dump money into an ASIC miner or something, mining BTC directly was taking way too long. LTC, on the other hand, is much easier to mine with basic computer hardware and is currently the second-highest priced alternate cryptocurrency.

So basically, I mine LTC, transfer it to BTC-E, use it to buy BTC, then transfer the BTC to a wallet or Coinbase or wherever.

If you're having issues getting any significant results from mining BTC, I'd recommend this method instead.

Have you used this particular mining pool before? If not, I'd suggest trying a different one to make sure the problem is with your computer, not with the pool.