It may not be worth 5 LTC, but I'm willing to take at least 1 off your hands if you see it as adequate and are feeling generous (wink wink, nudge nudge
)!For my example, I will demonstrate Pooled mining with Litecoin Wallet v0.6.3c - using the Burnside Pool and a CPU Miner on a Windows 7 device.
So, you want to have a crack at the big times and start mining for LTC, there are a few things you need to know:
You have two different types of mining - Solo, and Pooled mining.
- Solo mining is what it says, you mine by yourself and try to discover a block that can be used.
- Pooled mining is when you join a group of miners and work together in discovering blocks.
With Solo mining, it may be very rare that you will actually discover any Blocks, but if you do, the rewards will be entirely yours and yours alone. If you participate in a Pool, the rewards are distributed amongst the group when a Block is discovered.
1. To begin mining in a Pool, you will first need to acquire a copy of the Litecoin Wallet. See http://litecoin.org/ to download a copy of the wallet.
2. Once you have downloaded and installed (Protip: remember the installation location, you will need it later!) the wallet onto your device, you will then need to locate and open the LiteCoin-qt.exe application (normally found either within your Program Files directory or within Start).
3. After this application has loaded you will need to wait until it has finished Synchronising. This could take a while as it has to download every single transaction that has occured on the LiteCoin network. Have patience
OK! Now I am assuming that you are ready and rearing to go and mine some LTC!! From here it can get a little confusing, so I will try my best to take it in small steps. It is recommended to join a Pool (unless you have a beastly setup)
4. Navigate to http://ltc.kattare.com/ and click on "Register" near the top left of the page, from here you will need to enter your details to set an account up on this site. Once you have created your account, reenter your login details in the top center of the page to log in.
Now, you're almost ready to begin mining! We now have to download and configure a mining application to use with the LiteCoin Wallet and the Burnside Pool.
5. Click on "Getting Started" near the top right of the webpage (make sure you keep this page open! It has info we will need later), this explains the final few steps that are required before you can start mining with the Burnside Pool. (this page will not load until you have been successfully logged in).
6. You will need to download the CPU mining software required for mining. You can find this by locating the (Thread HERE) section of the page, or alternately by clicking: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/an-even-more-optimized-version-of-cpuminer-poolers-cpuminer-cpu-only-55038. This will take you to a thread in this forum with the required links.
7. You want to now choose either the 32 or 64 bit Windows software depending on your device (in my case, I chose 32 bit).
8. Follow the link to the SourceForge website and allow the timer to count down, once the countdown has completed you should be asked to save the .ZIP file to your device. (my antivirus software kicked up a fuss at this stage, it may be best to disable it until after you have downloaded the file!)
9. From here, you will need to find and extract the contents from the .ZIP file (it will be located wherever you downloaded it to, for me it was my general Downloads folder)
10. You can now configure the application so it can run on your device! You will need to navigate back to the "Getting Started" and follow the "Create cfg.json" step. This is actually really easy!!
11. Right click within the extracted directory and select New... Text Document. You will now want to COPY the contents between the { } braces (inclusive) and paste them into the Text Document.
12. You will need to edit the Text Document so it contains your individual details. On the "user" line, remove YOUR_USERNAME.YOUR_WORKER_SUFFIX (DONT REMOVE THE "") and replace it with what your username is that you signed up to the site with and your worker suffix (for example, the line could read: "user" : "John.1",). As you just signed up to the site, your worker suffix should be 1, unless you have created more workers, then you should know which one to use.
13. On the line "pass", remove YOUR_WORKER_PASSWORD (once again, DONT REMOVE THE "") and replace it with the password for the worker (I believe the default is x).
14. NOW Save the Text Document and exit it, within the extracted directory you will need to RENAME the file to cfg.json. You can do this by clicking once on the file and pressing F2 or by Right Clicking and selecting rename. (make sure that you have removed the .txt extension and replaced it with .json!)
15. Now! Locate the LiteCoin installation directory you remembered from Step 2 (aren't you glad I told you to remember it??). If you left it as default, it will be C:\Program Files\LiteCoin. You now want to move ALL the files from the extracted .ZIP archive (including the file you added) to the LiteCoin installation directory (so that all the files are in the same directory as LiteCoin-qt.exe)
You're almost there! (OMG!) We are at the final stretch now!
16. If you closed your LiteCoin wallet at any time, reopen the application and click on "Mining".
17. Change the "Type" to Pool, up the "Threads" to 4 (or however many you want to use), in "Server" enter "http://ltc.kattare.com" (without ""), in "Port" enter 9332, in "Username" enter the user that you entered into that Text Document and enter that same password you used into "Password".
18. Click "Start Mining"
19. ? ? ?
20. Profit!
Now you're mining!! Now that wasn't too hard was it?
There's one last thing left to do! How will Burnside pay you if you haven't entered your LTC Address???
1. In the LiteCoin Wallet, click "Receive Coins".
2. Create a New Address. (Give it a meaningful label).
3. Click "Copy Address"
4. Navigate back to the Burnside Pool website and log in: http://ltc.kattare.com/
5. Click "Account Settings" at the top of the page.
6. Paste your address into "Payment Address"
7. Enter your PIN and click "Update Account Settings"
YOU'RE DONE!!!
Phew, that took a while! Hope this is what you were looking for jae!