Topic: Newbie litecoin questions (Read 857 times)

Nothing personal but I find it irritating to help people setup rigs (or explain my own) as all the information you need is out there.

Forget the CPU, it can give you 100 to 20 times less hashing power than one ATI HD7950 for example.
Check out this page for a full comparison: https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison

Thanks for the advice, all. I'm broke and not a computer expert, so maybe my best bet is to buy? Unless there's a basic way to set up a mining operation? How effective is CPU litecoin mining?

I purchased hardware to mine litecoins instead of buying the coins direct for a few reasons - the main one being that if I purchase the coins and they become worthless, I won't be able to recoup a dime and I'll be left empty handed. At least with mining, the cards can be used for gaming and/or have some (ever decreasing) resale value.

Secondly, if it fails and I lose money when selling the cards, I'll be able to reuse the rigs minus the video cards as home web hosts and email servers for some of my lower to mid traffic websites once fibre to the home is installed here in 2015 (NBN in Australia). I currently host with Linode but with the ever increasing surveillance by the American government, I'm less inclined to have my servers located in that country. I use Google apps to host email for my domains purely for convenience but that and Adsense are the only reasons I have a Google account these days. Having the extra hardware around plus 100/40 mbit fibre will be just enough motivation to remove all Google services besides Adsense.

If you know you'll have some use for the hardware beyond mining and/or you don't mind taking what will be a big loss on the hardware should litecoin fail later than sooner, maybe mining is for you. Of course, should it fail, it'll most likely be sooner than later so you won't lose too much on the hardware resale.

Personally, I think it's likely to fail (as will all but bitcoin) but I'm more than happy to be proven wrong. You can hedge and play both sides of the fence.

I think litecoin will fail because of ASIC yet many people claim this is the exact reason litecoin will grow - because current bitcoin GPU miners will have no choice but to switch to another coin - this is incorrect. The most logical thing to do would be to sell all current hardware to fund the purchase of more ASIC equipment. This is what I think will happen but again, I'm more than happy to be proven wrong and I'll be in a better financial position should that be the case.

Right now I would say that it can go both ways. With coming ASICs plenty of miners might switch to ltc, and from my perspective if there is enough commitment from the community it might go off just like bitcoin.