Transcript - What is Litecoin mining?
Hello, and welcome to the Litecoin For Beginners video series. Litecoin is a virtual currency that has emerged as the second most popular and widely accepted cryptocurrency in the world. Bitcoin is currently ranked number one and if you want to watch a Bitcoin For Beginners video, you can click here. But in this video, I’m going to quickly cover what Litecoin is, how it differs from bitcoin in the easiest way to use our computers to mine Litecoin for us.
So Litecoin is a cryptocurrency and cryptocurrencies allow you to send and receive information from one person to another instantly with incredible encryption properties. Now this strength and security for transactions is what really attracts so many people to use it, especially to exchange money and value.
There are a few differences between bitcoin and Litecoin. For one, the number of total coins that can be created within the open source protocol. So with bitcoin, twenty-one million bitcoins can be created. But with Litecoin, eighty-four million Litecoins can be created. Secondly, the amount of time that it takes the network to create new coins is a little different. The bitcoin network creates twenty-five coins every ten minutes. The Litecoin network creates fifty coins every two and a half minutes. Now I’m not going to say why that’s good or bad. A lot of people have different takes on that. However, like bitcoin, each Litecoin can’t be subdivided into a hundred million smaller units. And that’s defined by eight decimal places. So each one point of Litecoin can be divided into a hundred million smaller units.
Now that we understand a little bit more about Litecoin, let’s begin with the Litecoin For Beginners video series. Now in part one, we’re going to accomplish a few things. The first thing we’re going to do is set up our Litecoin wallets so that we can send and receive Litecoins.
Now the second thing we’re going to do is, we’re going to download and configure our mining software so that we can use our graphics processor to mine Litecoin for us. Now as a reminder, I just want to point out that everything that I’m going to be talking about in this video, I’m going to have a download link in the video description. So if you want to skip the tutorial and download all of the software, go ahead and try it out.
So let’s get started. First things first, let’s go download the Litecoin wallet. And we want to make sure that we go to Litecoin.org to download the Litecoin wallet. This is a trusted source and we can download the Litecoin wallet for Windows, Mac or Linux. I have already downloaded the wallet and you can see here’s my shortcut. I’ve already installed it. Now I can launch the Litecoin wallet and you’ll see that when it starts, we’ll see a little splash screen here.
And then when it loads, it’s going to attempt to connect to the Litecoin network, and it’s going to try and sync. But just let it do its things, see now it’s down to ten from eleven. So it goes fairly quickly. The first thing that we want to do is click on receive. And we’re going to create a new address. So click on new address. And let’s give this address a name. Okay. Click on okay. You’ll see your address pop up here.
And there’s nothing that we’re going to do with this address right now, but we need it later in the video. So let’s minimize our wallet. The next thing we’ll want to do is download the mining software. And so for this example, we’ll be using my favorite software called GUIMiner scrypt. Now this is the easiest software to use. Anyone can use it. And I’m going to show you exactly what to put in. So we can download GUIMiner-scrypt from guiminer.org. This is the original website to download the program.
You could see here that there’s a download link for Windows. And if I click on that, I’ll get a little thing here that says “This file is malicious, and chrome has blocked it.” You can dismiss that. It’s not malicious. You might need to go into your settings and configure them to allow you to download this program. If you’re having trouble downloading it, go ahead and click on this link here. Have a look at the official forum thread on Bitcointalk.
If we click on that link there, that will bring us to the official thread and we can download the program from here. So that will work as well to download GUIMiner-scrypt. Go ahead and download that program. I’ve already done that. And so here is the folder that I’ve downloaded. Here is GUIMiner-scrypt. I’ll just double-click on the EXE file, minimize that. And it should pop up after launching the program.
Here is the program, but I have no idea what to put in any of these text boxes. So let’s go through this one at a time and I’ll tell you what to put in. So the first thing that we need to do is we need to find a host. So we’re going to join a pool. Now the pool that we’re going to join in this example is going to be wemineltc.com. But if we check out this website here, Litecoinpool.org/pools, we can see a nice pie chart of all the major pools and their market share in the Litecoin network.
Now I’m going to be showing you WeMineLTC. And this is the largest pool, but they weren’t the largest pool when I created my account. And by no means, is a pool any better because it’s larger. So I definitely encourage you to try out these other pools, like, Coinotron, Give Me Coins, LiteGuardian, because these pools might be better than WeMineLTC. However, I’ve already created my account with WeMineLTC. So that’s the account that I’ll be showing you.
Also, I want to point out this other resource that I found: it’s the Litecoin.info/Mining_pool_comparison. And we can compare all of the pools. In this chart, we can see there’s wemineltc.com. And this would just kind of give us a little bit more information, especially on the fees for that pool and we can just kind of do our homework on the pool. So I definitely recommend checking out the pool that you plan out joining before you join it.
I’ll just go to wemineltc.com, and I’ve already created an account. So you’ll need to create an account, click on my account. The first thing that we’re going to do is change your automatic payout threshold here. Right now it’s on zero, but I’m going to change it from zero to one. And this means that every time, my computer mines one Litecoin, it’s going to automatically send it to my wallet.
So put in my four-digit pin that I created when I created my account. And I’ll click on update settings, and that will update that automatic payout threshold setting. The second thing I’m going to do is change my payment address. So I’m going to go back into my wallet, hit the receive tab. Remember that address that we created, you want to right click on it, copy address, and we’re going to paste that address into this text box.
We’re going to enter our four-digit pin again. And we’re then going to click on send email code. That’s going to send a code to our email account. Once we get that code, we’ll put in our four-digit pin again and we’ll put in the code that they emailed to us and then we’ll click on change address. And that will change our payment address. And so that means every time we mine one Litecoin, it will automatically send that Litecoin to this address, which is the address in my wallet.
Now that we’ve configured our WeMineLTC account, we need to create a worker. And we’ll click on my account, my workers. Now we need to create a worker, and so we can add a new worker down here at the bottom and we can really put in anything we want here. This is just a name for our worker. So let’s just do beginners, my password, make it simple, one, two, three. It’s really not important. And then we’ll click on add new worker.
And when we do that, we’ll see that the worker now has been created. Here it is. And so we’re going to need this information in just a second. Right on the main page, we can see the servers here. So we’re going to choose, just the first server for this example. But you can see there are a number of servers in the United States, in Asia. And this is really so that if you’re trying one of these servers and you can’t connect, you can try a different server and see if that server is just experiencing problems.
So let’s bring up our GUIMiner. And the very first thing that we need is they host. And if we hover over this text box, we see a little hint there. It says host addresses or host address without the http prefix. So we’ll need everything after the slashes here. So I’ll just copy and paste this first host, everything to the dotcom, just like that. And then I’ll copy that, go back to the miner, we’ll paste that in there. Okay. It should look very similar.
But the port is three, three, three, four. So make sure that the port here three, three, three, four. Now the user name is going to be our worker that we just created. So here’s my worker, I’ll copy and paste the worker name right there. My password was very simple, just one, two, three.
Now my device is going to be my graphics card, which is this one here. You can see my processor, my CPU is available. And I could select that. But my graphics processor, which is this one here, it’s going to be about a hundred times faster than my processor. So, you know, choose whatever you can and see what works, see what doesn’t work. If you don’t see your processor or your graphics processor listed here, you may need to update your drivers. Here are the two links for AMD drivers. I’ll provide these two links in the video description.
Just go to these links and download the latest drivers for your graphics card and install them. But first, let’s just try mining with your setup right now. And then the next thing that we’ll need to set is our threat concurrency. So let’s just put ninety-two hundred here. In all of the settings that I’m going to be entering here are really good, just baseline starting point numbers.
And so ninety-two hundred, let’s put vectors, the default value was one. GPU Thread, the default value was one. Work size, default is two fifty-six. Now the intensity, this is really where – this is – this number here is going to make the biggest difference in your kilohertz per second or your megahertz per second speeds. So intensity, twenty is really high; ten is really low. So I’m going to choose something right in the middle. I think fifteen is good.
We want to make sure stratum is clicked yes. And we’re going to click on start. Now it’s either going to work or it’s not going to work. You can see that it’s working for me. And my speed is a hundred and seventy-nine kilohertz per second. If it doesn’t work for you, the very first thing that you should try is selecting something in this drop-down. Because I noticed that if I didn’t select something in this drop-down, sometimes I had glitches. So let’s just select sixty-nine, seventy, okay? It’s going to change some of these numbers.
Really, it’s only going to change this number and this number, which are fine. And let’s just keep all of these numbers like we haven’t and click on start. And you might find that by selecting something in the GPU default, it helps you out and it works for some reason. So you can see that now I’m actually mining faster than I was before. I was at a hundred and seventy-nine kilohertz per second before, now I’m at a hundred and eighty-eight kilohertz’s, two hundred kilohertz’s per second.
And the only number that really changed was this number here and my intensity. So if we increase our threat concurrency, and this is in kilobytes, we can increase our speed. So I’m going to bump the intensity up two-twenty. And I’m going to bump this up to nine thousand. And I’m going to click on start. And I bet it’s higher than two hundred kilohertz’s per second. But you will want to be careful, because if you go too high, you know, if you bump this intensity up to a hundred, it probably won’t make a difference over twenty or twenty-five.
But it’s going to really slow down your computer and it’s – it might be bad for your graphics processors. It could potentially burn them out, overheat them. All in all, these are good numbers to go with, to start off and to see what your speed is for mining. And then you can increase the intensity or increase the thread concurrency a little bit as you see fit, to see if you get better results. Now if you let this run, let’s just say, overnight. And you mine Litecoin all night, all of your statistics are going to be kept in your WeMineLTC profile.
So if I click on stats, I can get to my stats here and my dashboard here on the left-hand side. So that’s it. That’s the easiest way to mine Litecoin. I hope you enjoy part one of the Litecoin For Beginners video series. Please rate, comment and subscribe. In part two, I’ll be going over where do we exchange our money into Litecoin. In case, we’re having problems mining or maybe our computer isn’t fast enough to mine, whatever the reason maybe.
So thank you so much for watching. And I’ll see you in part two.