Traveling Lite

After the big bang of the cryptocurrency revolution, the universe of alternative coins began with the launch of the Litecoin project. Litecoin (LTC) was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee [1], a software engineer working at Coinbase, who was able to fork the code behind Bitcoin (BTC). LTC is a decentralized, peer-to-peer virtual currency that borrows from the same proof-of-stake blockchain verification underlying Bitcoin. But instead of using Bitcoin's SHA-256d algorithm, LTC adopted the scrypt [2] algorithm, which offers additional support for the use of GPUs in the mining process. The scrypt algorithm also makes it costly to perform hardware attacks on the encryption by requiring large amounts of memory.

The day of its launch saw LTC priced at about $0.30. Over the course of the past decade, its pricing has gone from around $40 to $410. During 2023, LTC fell anywhere between $60 and $100, and the price was at about $90 at the time of this article. The United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission (USCFTC) recently declared LTC a commodity [3], which is a giant step along the path of legitimacy and acceptance [4].

Choose Your Pool

Although it is possible to mine LTC solo or through a cloud service, the best option to get started is through pool mining. A mining pool is a super-computing cloud generated by multiple (up to thousands) of single registered users joining forces by combining all of their resources into one so that they can mine blocks together while receiving payment based on the amount of work they accomplish. In this scenario, any single working computer host is referred to as a miner and also needs to be registered on a mining pool. When miners cash out their balance, they will be charged a fee, which ranges generally from 2 to 5 percent, depending on the pool and cryptocurrency. My preferred pool for mining LTC is litecoinpool.org, which charges a 2 percent nominal fee [5]. Litecoinpool.org suggests that users withdraw unpaid balances starting at 0.01 LTC, although the minimum withdrawal is 0.002.

[...]