How to set up a litecoin miner

If you think that it is too late to mine Bitcoin, you can choose alternatives. One of the best of them is Litecoin. That’s why, if you want to mine, nothing can force you to give up. One aspect of this process is setting up the miner. This task is associated with many other aspects. Before that, you need to learn how to mine Litecoin. After reading this article, you will know all about this process.

Step 1: Do your own research

You should know what cryptocurrency you want to mine. It will save a lot of time and money for you. You should understand which advantages and disadvantages of Litecoin. There are a lot of pros that this cryptocurrency has:

1. High speed of block processing. The average speed of this process is about two and a half minutes. It is several times more than Bitcoin. It allows to make the time of transaction significantly shorter.
2. This cryptocurrency is convenient for sellers and buyers. This cryptocurrency allows you to make operations with several tokens.
3. Anonymity makes this cryptocurrency more attractive to users.
4. Decentralization – this principle totally eliminates an ability to regulate and control this cryptocurrency by individuals or government bodies.

However, there are a lot of disadvantages, but they exist in many other cryptocurrencies. They aren’t unique. The main disadvantage of Litecoin is the status uncertainty. There are no rules that regulate the cryptocurrency exchange and their usage as a payment method. Due to this, Litecoin isn’t stable. However, LTC is one of the most reliable cryptocurrencies that deserves to be mined.

Step 2: Creating a wallet

You are not able to mine Litecoin without a wallet where you can keep tokens. This is a preceding step before mining. An official Litecoin wallet is Litecoin Core. However, there is a very wide assortment of mobile crypto wallets. The most popular are Airbitz, Blockchain, Freewallet, MyCelium Wallet.
Before using the wallet, you are supposed to set a two-factor authentication. It can protect your cryptocurrency equity from the possibility of being stolen. We recommend you to create a backup of your wallet in a hidden place. Don’t give your private key in any circumstances.

Step 3: Getting information about hardware for mining

There is a lot of different productive mining equipment. Common disadvantages they have is a very high price and resource requirements. You need to read the information about the necessary hardware before you buy it.

We recommend you to buy GPU as powerful as you can afford. The best graphic card for mining is Nvidia GTX 1070. Hashrate is 30 megahashes per second. It has an 8 gigabytes RAM GDDR5, and its power is 150w. AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 is also not a bad option. It is cheaper than the previous one, but it heats more.

Step 4: Choosing a miner

There are a lot of miners that can help you to mine Litecoins. You should choose the best in your opinion, install and read the official instructions from developers. Every manufacturer attaches instructions to the device.

The first thing you need is a driver. This is an application that helps a computer to recognize the equipment and use it. Every driver has its own application that is used for setting up this device. Unfortunately, we can’t say more about this process because it can be different depending on the manufacturer, model, version of the driver and many other factors.

Step 5: Join a mining pool

Due to the increasing difficulty of tasks that devices have to complete, the best idea is to join a pool where you get the amount of money according to your contribution. The pool is like a club where members connect their computing power to get cryptocurrency faster.

Using an efficiency calculator

It would be very good if we knew the possible result to ensure that every action will help us to get the income. You can use the Litecoin mining efficiency calculator to do it. You should understand: if mining doesn’t bring any profit, you need to buy more power or mine another cryptocurrency.

While planning to mine cryptocurrency, don’t forget about electricity. It will cost you a significant amount. A lot of beginners often don’t take into account the fact that the cost of electricity often exceeds the income from cryptocurrency.

Start mining

Well, you are ready to launch your miner and earn money. Before starting, you need to set up these options:

1. IP-address. You should input it on your administrator or network router page. Then, input it in the web-browser.
2. Watch a list of connected devices on this page, find your miner and choose it. After that, you will see the dialog window of the miner’s access. Log in, using your account data which is printed on the instructions.
3. Next input URL-address, login and password of a chosen pool and press Apply.

Also, you need to protect your wallet from dishonest actions before mining starts. One of the methods to achieve this goal is to turn two-factor authentication on. After inputting your personal data, you get an additional password that is sent to your mobile phone number.

To sum up

Setting up the miner isn’t a very hard task. The main problem is in the fact that it’s hard to talk about details due to significant differences between manufacturers, models of equipment and other factors that largely affect this process.

The mechanism of mining is similar to other cryptocurrencies. However, LTC is a very promising cryptocurrency token. There are a lot of advantages that this coin has. Disadvantages are not specific, they are typical for all modern cryptocurrencies. What you should understand?

1. Cryptocurrency is a very volatile asset. You should understand that reward can both grow and fall. It is a possible that when you mine Litecoin, it will cost significantly less the next day. That’s why it is recommended to constantly analyze price growth and fall prospects. This way you can protect your money from losing their value.
2. Consider the cost of electricity. The profitability depends on the price of energy.
3. Use auto settings to maintain the best hashrate. It is possible thanks to special improvements to basic settings. Auto settings will be useful for miners with old equipment.
4. Think about cooling. Efficiency decreases every time the temperature of equipment grows. That’s why you need to cool it.
5. Also, you need to think strategically. There won’t be any reasons to mine Litecoin by yourself in some years because of increased difficulty. That’s why you’d better find other coins at the same time. Diversification is your key to success.