[ANN] Litecoin - a lite version of Bitcoin. Launched!

[coblee]

There's going to be a new Litecoin release soon that includes all of Bitcoin's recent fixes. Thanks to the the help from pooler and fanquake. We created a new Litecoin github project and rebranched from Bitcoin and added in all the Litecoin changes. We are currently testing the code to make sure everything still works. If you'd like to help out, come by IRC channel #litecoin-dev on freenode.net

Stay tuned.

Rebranching from latest Bitcoin... does it mean we will get BIP16 (multisig) as well?
I think it required some careful planning and support from pools before it was fully enabled in Bitcoin.

Yes, it does. I will look into it.

[crazy_rabbit]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

[smoothie]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

Yeah don't sell because maybe we might want to buy all your coins lol

[btcash]

Price has doubled in the last week. Litecoin is starting to get the attention of investors.

[mystery2048]

I think the price of litecoins in due for a large rally...

[smoothie]

I think the price of litecoins in due for a large rally...

I suspect the second half of 2012 will have some quite volatile price movements for both BTC and LTC and USD and SLV and GLD

[molecular]

I think the price of litecoins in due for a large rally...

I suspect the second half of 2012 will have some quite volatile price movements for both BTC and LTC and USD and SLV and GLD

I suspected that for the first half of 2012. Didn't materialize to the extent I imagined...

[smoothie]

I think the price of litecoins in due for a large rally...

I suspect the second half of 2012 will have some quite volatile price movements for both BTC and LTC and USD and SLV and GLD

I suspected that for the first half of 2012. Didn't materialize to the extent I imagined...

Well my suspicion has a reason. It's election season and the markets will be moving more based on those events. Volatility will pick up in the second half of 2012

[makomk]

Rebranching from latest Bitcoin... does it mean we will get BIP16 (multisig) as well?
I think it required some careful planning and support from pools before it was fully enabled in Bitcoin.

Yes, it does. I will look into it.

For now you should be able to just soft-disable it by changing the "true" to "false" on line 498 of init.cpp:

if (GetBoolArg("-bip16", false))

[coblee]

Litecoin Pirate Passthrough if anyone is interested:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91240.0

[SgtSpike]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

Still not worth it.  If I was going to pay $9/month in electricity to mine $2.44 worth of LTC, then I just lost $6.56 for no good reason.  Instead, it would be much smarter to put that $9 into the coins themselves.  Then, at the end of the month, I have $9 worth of LTC, instead of $2.44 worth of LTC.

Mining at a loss makes no sense.  Buy instead of mine at that point.

[smoothie]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

Still not worth it.  If I was going to pay $9/month in electricity to mine $2.44 worth of LTC, then I just lost $6.56 for no good reason.  Instead, it would be much smarter to put that $9 into the coins themselves.  Then, at the end of the month, I have $9 worth of LTC, instead of $2.44 worth of LTC.

Mining at a loss makes no sense.  Buy instead of mine at that point.

Yes you have the right idea. Some mine for the novelty of mining despite the loss.

Early bitcoin miners mined at a loss too. It was for the novelty and look at them now with their stashes of BTC 

[SgtSpike]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

Still not worth it.  If I was going to pay $9/month in electricity to mine $2.44 worth of LTC, then I just lost $6.56 for no good reason.  Instead, it would be much smarter to put that $9 into the coins themselves.  Then, at the end of the month, I have $9 worth of LTC, instead of $2.44 worth of LTC.

Mining at a loss makes no sense.  Buy instead of mine at that point.

Yes you have the right idea. Some mine for the novelty of mining despite the loss.

Early bitcoin miners mined at a loss too. It was for the novelty and look at them now with their stashes of BTC 

Early bitcoin miners who were mining at a loss also could have had even larger stashes of BTC if they had bought instead of mined.

I can understand it from the novelty or hobby perspective, but from any other perspective, especially financial, it just doesn't make sense.

[smoothie]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

Still not worth it.  If I was going to pay $9/month in electricity to mine $2.44 worth of LTC, then I just lost $6.56 for no good reason.  Instead, it would be much smarter to put that $9 into the coins themselves.  Then, at the end of the month, I have $9 worth of LTC, instead of $2.44 worth of LTC.

Mining at a loss makes no sense.  Buy instead of mine at that point.

Yes you have the right idea. Some mine for the novelty of mining despite the loss.

Early bitcoin miners mined at a loss too. It was for the novelty and look at them now with their stashes of BTC 

Early bitcoin miners who were mining at a loss also could have had even larger stashes of BTC if they had bought instead of mined.

I can understand it from the novelty or hobby perspective, but from any other perspective, especially financial, it just doesn't make sense.

And thats where we agree. Your perspective is financial and some others are just hobby/novelty.

[kano]

... and ... as I've mentioned in here before ... if you spent those $9 on buying LTC you would also be helping increase the price of LTC ...

[rdponticelli]

Mining isn't just about immediate profit. It's also a contribution to the wellbeing of the network, and to the security of it's transactions. Everyone concerned about the future of his investments should be mining as well as buying.

[markm]

... and ... as I've mentioned in here before ... if you spent those $9 on buying LTC you would also be helping increase the price of LTC ...

Driving up the price in early days might not have always seemed a good idea though. As long as people thought coins were worthless, there was less mining competition. If people saw the coins actually being bought in quantity instead of merely mined in quantity, they might have realised duh these things might actually be worth something. So maybe at least early on it might be more in miners interest not to buy simple because buying might cause more people to get into mining.

Kind of seems like the longer you can chug along initially at low difficulty by not encouraging competition, the better?

I know for example that the people who have thrown some CPU power at GRouPcoin mining from time to time are quite happy that it has continued so long to slip under the radar, keeping its difficulty so low even CPUs can mine it effectively.

-MarkM-

[kano]

Meh - mining at a sizeable % loss is silly.

At the moment you can mine (on linux) on a single ATI 6950 for only a little below what you'd get BTC mining.

(yes I tried this last week and ran it for 12 hours and got 3 LTC blocks as was expected with ~400KH/s)

As for "chug along initially at low difficulty by not encouraging competition, the better?"
I'm not exactly sure what you are thinking there, but ... sounds to me like
"making LTC more popular is bad coz more people will use it ..." yeah OK forget that idea

[divergenta]

Does exist any binary (.deb?) version yet? I'm apparently to retarded to compile it myself. 

[crazy_rabbit]

Thanks.  All I have to mine on is a Q6600, which according to the hardware sheet would generate somewhere around 21 KH/s.  And according to this calculator (http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=21&difficulty=1.87537559), about $2.44/month.  Not worth it!

But thanks for the response. 

Not worth it today you mean. If litecoin was $100 per coin, you might feel different. Plan for the long run future, not selling cryptocoins short.

Still not worth it.  If I was going to pay $9/month in electricity to mine $2.44 worth of LTC, then I just lost $6.56 for no good reason.  Instead, it would be much smarter to put that $9 into the coins themselves.  Then, at the end of the month, I have $9 worth of LTC, instead of $2.44 worth of LTC.

Mining at a loss makes no sense.  Buy instead of mine at that point.

You are correct if your purchases of coins aren't large enough to change the price of LTC significantly. Otherwise, all the money you might have spent on mining might be large enough to dramatically alter the price of LTC and thus- quickly make it more expensive. So at the end it would be really tricky to calculate exactly how much better off you end up.