Litecoin and ARM CPUs: A crypto-currency you can mine on the $25 Raspberry Pi?

[Jon]

It would be nice if a community member or two could make a crypto-currency work on ARM proccessors; the top cpu architecture used in mobile devices. Since Litecoin is the crypto-currency of CPUs, this seems like the most viable candidate.

Why? Well, you could start mining with a Raspberry Pi for only $25 (http://www.raspberrypi.org/). I find that pretty cool. You could also theoretically mine on used iPhones, iPod Touches and other discarded devices. Support could be brought to payment networks with little start-up cost and little energy by anyone.  People in lesser-off parts of the world could make a living off the world's electronic waste. This helps people, further decentralizes the benefiting currency while making it stronger.

Another possible pro is this could lead to less electronic waste in our environment.

Thoughts?

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[SoundMoney4aFreeSociety]

wouldn't the processing power be too insignificant to prevent counterfeiting and keep the crypto-currency secure...from my understanding the amount of processing power it takes to make a block is part of the security and keeps it rare if it were easy to make blocks it really would be no different than a video game currency people would trade for physical items that is all good when you want a game currency to play the game with but once the game is over its valueless unless you can sell your character and goods for cash you can spend outside the game...and even then it would lack liquidity which all currency must have!
I dont know maybe i'm way off base here but my technical knowledge is very limited and i'm more interested in bitcoin because i'm a fan of economics and the Austrian economics school of thought...
I have a question if i built miners with an APU's combined with GPU's would that increase a MH/s rate with any significance that would be cost effective

[Jon]

wouldn't the processing power be too insignificant to prevent counterfeiting and keep the crypto-currency secure...

A whole, cheaply-aquired farm of mobile devices would provide significant processing power. Every hash supports the network, no matter the source.

Even if one hobbyist only supports the network with one Raspberry Pi node, she is still making the network stronger. She is still creating another point that would have to be comprised in order to control the network.

[schnell]

Even better, you could have a large gpu attached to a raspberry pi, because it cuts down electricity costs, and no software has to be made, which costs.
Plus less electricity would be needed to cool, because it is small and exposed

[qualalol]

I believe there are discussions in the mining forum, which amount to: the MHash/s is too low to be sensible (you'd have less MHash/$ than with a GPU). Due to a lack of PCI-E you can't connect a GPU. What they would be useful for is controlling an FPGA farm, since currently most people seem to use a standard computer to control FPGAs which is inefficient due to the 100s of W a computer uses compared to a RaspberryPi.

Edit: the specific thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=55532.0
Edit2: noticed it's litecoins you're talking about. Maybe someone should do some performance tests to check?
Edit3: I'm going to make an optimistic estimate of 0.5Kh/s for a Raspberry mining Litecoin (my Core i5 laptop has ~1Kh/s per core...). According to the calculator on http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=.25&difficulty=1.42855586 I would make less than $2 a year. Definitely not worth it, unless you already have the raspberry to control an fpga farm, or already have a computer to GPU mine...

[runeks]

You can already mine with a $25 Raspberry Pi. The thing is that an x86 CPU will be about 100 times as fast. So when you have spent $2500 on Raspberry Pi's, you have the equivalent processing power of a $200 CPU.

ARM is made for low power, not high efficiency.

[SoundMoney4aFreeSociety]

Right on well I'm learning...Its nice that i asked a question and didn't get smashed on for it...this seems like a good community!

[Transisto]

...
Thoughts?

Don't you have any sense of scale / perspective ?

[juggalodarkclow]

somewhere Pooler shows mining on an iPhone 3G, was getting something like .10 Khash/s

[grimd34th]

building off of the idea that you could use the pi as a head.
why not just set it up to monitor all miners and maybe have it generate some shiny graphs and connection info on a webserver.
doesnt seem like a difficult task to me.