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I recently heard about litecoin and thought it would be a good alternative of bitcoin as it is "faster" with less requirement. however, I noticed that any attempt to mine litecoins is significantly slower than mining bitcoins. why is the hashrate so much lower?
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Litecoin, by intentional design, uses a hashing algorithm that can't be made as efficient as Bitcoin's can. Computing a Litecoin block hash requires about 1,000 times more computations that a Bitcoin block hash.
The OP isn't using an ASIC but rather a CPU - hence LiteCoin's O(1) constant-time difference with BitCoin on a CPU. If a newer currency like LiteCoin is slower than BitCoin on a CPU then scrypt in-and-of itself isn't the reason. Either LiteCoin network difficulty spiked or the OP has config/internet latency problem. – LateralFractal – 2013-10-13T10:16:02.330
I wonder how it is called litecoin if it is actually "heavier" to mine than a regular bitcoin. – ZCoder – 2013-10-13T14:43:33.510
Already? I would have thought BitCoin GPUs and FPGAs wouldn't migrated across to LiteCoin yet. – LateralFractal – 2013-10-13T02:06:00.203
I don't have a FPGA, I'm using CPU. please elaborate. – ZCoder – 2013-10-13T03:04:55.217
Other people on the network are already using GPUs or FPGAs. I'll leave a formal answer to those more familiar with LiteCoin, but I'd guess according to this report that LiteCoin difficulty has increased faster than its developers anticipated (unless it was a speculative reboot/pump&dump instead of genuinely new cryptocurrency) - probably due to miners already familiar with BitCoin hashing moving across without the same implementation/popularity delays that BitCoin had.
– LateralFractal – 2013-10-13T03:12:59.277oh... so I'm already too late for litecoin? – ZCoder – 2013-10-13T14:24:00.703
Unless you can steal electricity, yes I'd say so. You could still buy LiteCoin in the speculative sense, but I'm not how that differs from any other stock market gambling. Do want this as an answer so people can vote up or down on it? – LateralFractal – 2013-10-13T22:12:35.030
hmm...I see litecoins haven't exploded the cost yet, I'll look into it. – ZCoder – 2013-10-13T22:51:50.087