Hey, I am new to mining altcoins and have a question on hardware.
Can ASIC miners for bitcoin work with altcoins?
Is there a dedicated miner for altcoin mining?
What hardware would you buy for around $300, with electricity being free?
Currently I am just using a GTX 650Ti.
There are several ASIC mining hardware in pipeline that will mine at minimum 100 mHASH/s (and higher), so mining scrypt with a $300 hardware will hardly yield any benefits.
Rather you should buy an affordable (maybe a used one) AMD GPU; probably even sell your 650Ti and get an AMD instead, since NVIDIA GPUs are not great at mining.
And then concentrate on ASIC-resistant coins that use X11 algo, not scrypt - for example DarkCoin. That will keep you in profitable mining for extended period of time than mining scrypt.