How to Mine Litecoin and other Altcoins

While it is now considered too late for hobbyists without expensive ASIC processors to start mining bitcoins, many of the alternative digital currencies are still well suited for mining on your home PC. In this guide, we’ll take you through all you need to know to start digging up a few litecoins, feathercoins or dogecoins without any costly extra equipment.

For the most part, cryptocurrencies employ either SHA-256 or scrypt as their proof-of-work hashing algorithm, but many of the newer currencies, have opted for scrypt. Scrypt tends to be more memory intensive; however, home PCs with reasonably powerful graphics cards can still mine those cryptocurrencies quite effectively, as there are no dedicated ASICs to compete with – yet. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s still possible to use just your computer’s CPU to mine some of the digital currencies. This holds true, even if you have only a laptop with integrated graphics; though this may not prove terribly effective and is not a set-up we would recommend… CONTINUE