I would 2nd the initial question. I would also like to know the most profitable coin to mine atm in terms of computing power/energy consumption to returns. I will say though that I tried mining LTC recentlyy using GUIMiner_Scrypt and it would not work for me. It can be very technically challenging from what i gather as there are many factors which can cause it not to work such as incompatible drivers, knowing the correct ports and god knows what else. I fiddled with all these and couldn't get it to work. but anyway, while we await more knowledgable answers, I have some further thoughts and extra questions that hopefully the good people here can help with...
Based on what I just said, I think mining on your own machines may not be the best option for everyone, which is where paying someone else to do it for you might be a better option. Looking at this thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=232739.80 ...would anyone like to suggest the best offers out there for cloud mining/mining rig contracts for bit coin and other crypto currencies? The cloud hashing company doesn't seem to be going down very well in there for offering good deals. Ideally a company offering such services with the ability to mine a wider range of coins than just bit coin would be good such as lite coins and tag coins. Litecoin seems to me to be a good bet. Well known and established witout being to "sheepy" and bandwagony if you like. Tag coin seemed to me the most profitable based on my limited research and understanding in terms of the time likely to take to mine an amount equivilent ot 1 BTC at current exchange rates.
And just to be clear I am not a sheep jumping on the bandwagon. I have known all about bitcoin since 2011 when Max Keiser started adoring it. I always planned to invest and mine and was convinced the price would soar in the future but thought I had much more time before the sheep found out about it and thus it wasn't a priority. My expected timescale was more like 2020 before we reached this point! To save myself from smashing my house or slitting my wrists at the missed opportunity, I can at least take confort in a few things.. Number 1 being in the fact that my logic suggests to me that with the huge price increases this week, mining should be a lot more profitable.... This is of course based on the presumption that the number of miners or the difficulty has not increased at the same rate, but I wouldn't have expected that it would as i gather that altough a lot of these new sheep investors have come along and invested cos they've heard about bitcoin on the news, a small percentage are likely to be the kind of people who are technically minded enough to understand mining or even know much about that aspect of bitcoin and other crypto currencies. Does this logic appear to be correct and sound?
Also, I still think in the long run these are very early days and we will still be looked back on in years to come as (relatively) early adopters. Also, I feel the price is likely to rise far more above where it is now in the coming months and years. Not only due to the likeley increased awareness and usage but also due to the 21 million coin limit of BTC so there is still much to look forward to I think.
Also, finally just a slight technical question about BTC... Does the hash rate for X amount of computing power....
A.) Go down as mining difficulty increases over time and thus the mining rate goes down by the same amount
or
B.) Stay the same, but you just need to have a higher hash rate (and therefore more powerful hardware) in order to achieve the same rate of mining BTC?
Thanks!
