This post is all about Litecoin. I will update it whenever I learn something new. Bookmark this page and visit again whenever you think of it.
To begin with, I have downloaded Litecoin-QT for Mac OS X to run on my desktop Mac, a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacMini with 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM, that I got in late 2010. Litecoin-QT is a wallet app. I have encrypted my wallet with a password to make it harder to hack. :P On launching, the first thing Litecoin-QT starts doing is synchronizing with the blockchain of transactions, starting from the beginning… this can take quite a long time.
DONATIONS
Here is Tame Bear’s Litecoin address you can use to test the sending capabilities of your own digital wallet:
Lh5KMouft1UMTyxyw5QdX26FMHwEBNsGcR
All donations welcome!
EARLY APRIL, 2014
Why Litecoin and not Bitcoin? I have read about the kind of computing power required for Bitcoin mining these days, and I’m not going there.
But then here’s Litecoin — Bitcoin’s little brother — and it can be mined on an older Mac at over 6 kilo hashes* per second (KH/s)
Ok, before we get too far here, let me explain that you can’t mine Litecoin very fast on an old Mac like this. In about three days, I’ve earned 0.003 LiteCoin. Current price of Litecoin in US dollars is $11.00 so I have earned 3 and a third cents. Next I will put the kilowatt meeter on my mining computer and see how much electricity I am using, and how much it costs.
To get there, I had to create an account at one of many mining pools that have emerged in this new economic ecosphere. I chose https://www.wemineltc.com/ and set up a couple “workers” there to connect to the mining app running on my computer.
ASTEROID
The mining application I found for Bitcoin/Litecoin mining on a Mac is “Asteroid,” a free download, set it to use your mining workers, and start mining.
Ok, it wasn’t exactly that easy. Asteroid is not a finished product, it’s still in beta. So perfection has not yet been achieved. What I found was that the default worker in my wemineltc.com account never was able to sync properly with Asteroid. Solve that by creating an additional miner such as “tamebear.2” password “x” and that’ll work. (Go ahead and try my worker if you like, I’ll use every bit of processing you care to give.) So then you’ve initialized your miner and now you’re mining.
Or at least it looks like Asteroid is mining, but a scan of the logs appears to indicate that no actual processing has been accomplished yet. If that’s your situation, then dig into your Asteroid preferences ( Asteroid > Preferences ), click the Scrypt tab and choose a different Kernal. (Mine is set to ckolivas.)
Stop-and-start Asteroid for new preferences to be used. Then check Intensity (it’s the little down-pointing triangle to the right of your processor bar in the main Asteroid window.) Start with an intensity of 10, and try clicking it higher to see if you can process faster without generating hardware errors or rejected work units.
* A “hash” is a chunk of computation. Parallel processing built into modern graphics processors is an excellent platform for receiving, processing, and communicating chunks of data in parallel.
Tags: digital currency, Litecoin, mining, wallet
