Mining questions for both B/LTC might be questions most newbs cant figure out

[priitk]

Hello fellow members,

I'm here to hopefully answer questions many newbs to cryptocurrency have. I question the manipulation of wallets, alts, BTC and LTC mining in this order so if you may only contribute to one topic please do. I'll begin by saying that I have 0 experience with GNU/Linux and have used Windows since ~98. I plan on installing Linux and fiddling with it in the near future, but for now I'd like to mine LTC on my W7 system with a 5850 ATI GPU. If I must install wingw for mining to exist then please let me know how and why before we go any further and we can come back to the following. link - http://www.mingw.org

Here I question wallets.
Can you mine any currency all with one piece of software i.e. phoenix with LTC or cgminer with BTC & TRC? Should I get rid of one or the other?

I know you need to have a node installed for every currency which is basically a wallet downloaded from the desired website. Is there a program in which you can manage all of your wallets for all of your currencies? Currently my desktop is a mess because I have installed BTC wallet, Bitcoin Minter, Multibit, LTC wallet, phoneix, cgminer... What do I keep and what do I get rid of? I tried to open my BTC wallet.dat file into MultiBit and it would not open as it used .wallet files...? WTF IS GOING ON?!

Here I question alts.
I know new cryptocurrencies are going to keep coming out, and I know LTC is generated more quickly than BTC, but are the new currencies able to be created exactly the same way as these two? Like dopplegangers in a sense? Please correct me if I'm wrong but BTC & LTC are not dopplegangers? It seems that these two are the only two being widely adopted, but which other currencies are actually logical and how can I, joe blow, filter out all these new 'scamcoins'? I know the value completely depends on the demand, so if there are dopplegangers, the values are unlikely to compete with B/LTC.

Now, perhaps I have not done my homework completely but I have been reading on this for days and my eyes are getting tired. If the answers to my questions have already been answered someone could kindly direct me to these answers. I have read the beginners guide and some things seem to be completely over my head or I am trying too hard to understand simple ideas.

Here I question mining BTC.
Bitminter, to my knowledge, is a java based app that uses your GPU to brute force hack a share with a set difficulty. I have been using this, but I am told phoenix v2 is the superior client for my GPU. This software's topic posted by jedi95 says, "to connect to a pool such as Slush use this 'phoenix -u http://USERNAME.WORKERNAME:PASSWORD@api2.bitcoin.cz:8332/ -k phatk2 DEVICE=0 VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=4'." I'm guessing other than the username and pw, the other settings act like a kernel and tell the GPU what to do? For reference this is the recommendation '-k phatk2 VECTORS BFI_INT AGGRESSION=7'. I can understand getting login credentials but where do you find the port number i.e. 8332?

Here I question mining LTC.
I referred to tacotime's topic on 'Consolidated LTC mining guide for ATI GPUs' and have come up with a command line which I need that looks like this 'cgminer --scrypt -o http://notroll.in -u username -p password --thread-concurrency 8000 -I 18 -g 1 -w 256'. I was told I need to enter this line in the cfg file but I don't see any .cfg's.. What is the name of the cfg file? I'm not sure if this line is incorrect as it does not contain a place for a port number for the website at all?



I know I had more to ask as well I just got lost in the thinking that went into this post. But please, halp!

[priitk]

Bump for help, mostly if somebody could help me understand how to mine LTC that would be appreciated.

[clapyourhands]

Here I question mining LTC.
I referred to tacotime's topic on 'Consolidated LTC mining guide for ATI GPUs' and have come up with a command line which I need that looks like this 'cgminer --scrypt -o http://notroll.in -u username -p password --thread-concurrency 8000 -I 18 -g 1 -w 256'. I was told I need to enter this >line in the cfg file but I don't see any .cfg's.. What is the name of the cfg file? I'm not sure if this line is incorrect as it does not contain a place for >a port number for the website at all?

I don't know anything about a cfg file for cgminer. How I've been setting it up to mine LTC or any of its forks using scrypt algorithms is by making a .BAT file in the cg miner directory and then making a shortcut to that somewhere easily accessible like the desktop. That way I can have multiple configurations for cgminer linked to different pools or my machine depending on whether I want pooled or solo mining, scrypt or sha256 algorithm etc. (I do the same for BTC and it's forks, for ease of use, just without --scrypt and the other unnecessary flags)

so basically open your text editor (notepad will work, but I recommend notepad++) and enter in

'cgminer.exe --scrypt -o URL -u USER -p PASS' etc etc for whatever settings your want it to run at, when you save it make sure to save as 'All file types' and give it a .bat extension.

As far as knowing which port, that's determined by either A: the mining pool you're mining for, they should give you the URL and port necessary or for solo mining B:whatever your .conf file calls for on your coin client while url would be localhost or 127.0.0.1

cgminer can mine any currency so far since it can implement both sha256 or scrypt. I haven't really tried any others, except pooler's cpu miner optimized for LTC.

there's no software yet that I'm aware of for managing multiple currencies, there may be some online options. I haven't used multibit, and I don't if importing your bitcoin wallet into it will work, but it may be as simple as changing the extension on your wallet.dat to wallet.wallet if the extension is the only thing that differs between the way the two programs back things up.

All the altcoins so far have been either sha256 or scrypt, so yes they are all basically made the same way as those two, and no, they're not the same since they use different algorithms.

The only altcoin I've seen that seems logical, at least in theory, is freicoin because it implements a demurrage to keep money constantly circulating, whether or not in reality it is a scam it's too early to tell.

hope some of that helps

BTC: 17gMkAVMjWDp7ePVwgAj2DeXWZ8aw7ypVt
LTC: LXFWKMohk928FYNiyCSVcHeqVpeCAnKcW9

[Bullbear]

This is a good thread, I'd like to hear some experienced user opinions on this one, don't want to be mining a currency for it to go the way of solidcoin! For instance, what's the opinion on Terracoin, will it last or is it just another fad, I think litecoin might do well, the hash rate and difficulty has been climbing recently, and I think when all the asic's come online this might be where a lot of gpu miners will go.