How many kH/s would a litecoin pool have to sustain over a month to be able to cover the hosting costs?

Doing some (very rough) math, it seems to me that:

a decent fully dedicated (non vps) server would run ~$100/mo.

if you're running a 1% commission, you would thus have to mine $10,000/mo worth of LTC.

at the current exchange rate, $10,000 USD/m ~= 4,000,000 LTC/m.  (or ~133,333 LTC/d)

in my (2 days ;-) of mining experience, ~ 3000kH/s roughly translates to 2600 LTC/d.  if you use that ratio, you would then have to mine at an average of 154,000kH/s to mine 133,333 LTC/d.

Thus, at the current exchange rate, with $100/mo expenses, and a 1% commission, your mining pool would need to be averaging 154,000kH/s to break even.

Extrapolating that out, even at a 5% commission, you'd still have to mine at 31,000kH/s as a pool to make $100/mo... are there any litecoin pools pulling that off?

Could someone check my math?

Seems like most of the pools are banking on a better exchange rate I guess?
 

Actually have an idea, I would like to start several faucet sites, if someone can create one.
I can get it going, this will get more people into i0coins.

And I can keep them going for some time.

Well it seems i0coin is still progressing, even if slowly.
Since it is a community based project,
I hope it succeeds and the bugs are fixed.

Good thing is everyone contributed a little bit,
and every little bit makes a difference.

And that's what I call a decentralized community
based currency. Hopefully one day it gets
recognized, and becomes a bigger currency.
And one day we can let everyone know
that this is completely a community based currency.

The dinosaurs failed, I heard they were pretty big.

If your electricity is free, then yes. OTHERWISE, you're better off taking the money you'd spend on the extra electricity cost of running your CPU at 100%, and buying the LTC that way.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

At $0.0025 and B 0.0005 per LTC, it's not worth mining PERIOD.

All I can hope for is adoption by miners who drop out of BTC after the reward split and ASIC release 

This is closer to the real world performance that I've see, but regardless, LTC is not GPU hostile. If you want to mine LTC, you're far better off getting a PC with 5 GPUs than getting 5 CPUs, just like BitCoin.

But then you are comparing a low-end CPU with a high-end GPU (well, actually a card with 2 high-end GPUs).

Typically on a high-end CPU you get about 20 MH/s on Bitcoin, or about 40 kH/s on Litecoin.
On a high-end GPU you can get about 400 MH/s on Bitcoin, or about 400 kH/s on Litecoin.

The BTC/LTC speed ratio is about 1000:1 for GPUs, but only about 500:1 for CPUs, i.e., CPUs are still two times more efficient than GPUs when it comes to scrypt.

I'd like a site that lists the full up to date historical data of LTC/BTC and LTC/USD.

+1

Yes, but please keep the numbers real: it's more like 10x for scrypt (Litecoin) versus 20x for SHA-256d (Bitcoin).

I believe you meant "mining litecoins is not profittable"

Confidence in Litecoin took a huge blow when it turned out that GPUs were in fact better suited for mining than CPUs, which completely contradicted what the developers claimed at launch.

CPU dominance was the primary reason for my interest and investment in Litecoin, and I had great plans for it. That is no longer the case. I will be holding on to my litecoins, though I am now waiting for a true CPU only Crypto-Currency to take it's place.

The issue was mitigated at the time by the fact that it was still better to mine Bitcoins and buy litecoins with them, rather than mine LTC via GPU directly. But LTC has officially been thrown into the ring with BTC, and if the exchange is any indication, the outlook is grim. You could literally halve it's trading value right now with a few hundred dollars.

If it is to survive, it will need a "killer feature" and serve an actual purpose.

I don't want to discourage people, but I think the litecoin devs need a prod and a wakeup. Litecoin still has a healthy network of hashing power, and is in a good position to make a recovery, given the right changes.

I am not a developer by any stretch, but with the coming of FPGAs and ASICs onto the Bitcoin scene, coupled with the reward split, there are going to be a lot of Ex-Bitcoin GPUs floating around, and I bet a fair number will find their way onto the Litecoin Network.

This may be when Litecoin becomes the "silver" to bitcoin, but there are so many assumptions there, the outlook is a complete wash.

Personally, I would like to see the Litecoin decimal move 1 digit to the right ( for a limit of 840,000,000 coins) as I don't believe a mere "4x BTC limit" is going to be enough if LTC becomes a "cash" to Bitcoins "Gold".

Having a reward drop of 10% per 10% "remaining coins mined" would also be a great improvement over bitcoins 50% drop per 50% "remaining coins mined".

However, GPU hostility is impossible to do with Litecoin, as that sort of change would create a whole new chain/network.

I've heard a rumor that Litecoin is now able to be mined with GPUs.  If this is true, that will kind of spoil it for those who mine with just CPUs.  Any truth to this rumor?