Litecoin LTC mining guide, cpu

Step 1: Litecoin LTC CPU mining

This guide will show you how to get started with Litecoin CPU mining. If anything is unclear in this guide please leave a comment about it. You’ll want to start with pooled mining as solo mining is not very viable anymore.  The difficulty of the network is too high to effectively solo mine with a single computer. It’ll take a very long time to get a single block of 50 LTC. I suggest you skip to step 2 for pooled mining. However, for people with access to many computers I’ll leave the basics of solo mining in this guide and you can continue reading.

If you want to do solo-mining you’ll need to have the Litecoin client installed and configured. You can download the Litecoin client here, if you are running windows look for the latest litecoin-x.x.xx-win32-setup.exe as this is the easiest way to install the client.

After you installed the Litecoin client it will have to catch up with the network first before you can start mining as you can see in the image below.

Once the client is done synchronizing with the network (this can take some time) you’ll have to get a cpu miner.

In order for the Litecoin client to support mining you’ll have to create an ini file in the %appdata%\litecoin folder. To get to this folder click your start button (start->run for Windows XP) and type in %appdata%\litecoin

Now right click in the folder (not on a file or directory) and goto New->Text Document

Rename it to litecoin.conf

Now you should get this pop-up as you’re trying to change the extension of a .txt file to .conf. Click Yes.

If you don’t get the above pop-up you’ll have to switch off “Hide extensions for known file types”. In Vista/Windows7 you can find this by pressing ALT once and then going to the Tools->Folder options menu. In Windows XP this menu should be visible without pressing ALT.

After this, remove the .txt from the filename so the full name becomes litecoin.conf.

Now open litecoin.conf and insert this information:

You should change the username and password for safety, even though you’re only allowing the localhost here trojans and mallware ect. could easily access your wallet if you have the standard username/password.

Step 2:

The fastest cpu miner out there is currently pooler’s cpu miner, you can download the appropriate version from one of the links below.

Windows 32 bits Version 2.23
Windows 64 bitsVersion 2.22
Linux 32 bits Version 2.2.3
Linux 64 bits Version 2.2.3
Macintosh 32 bits Version 2.1.2
Macintosh 64 bits Version 2.2.2

Extracting the zip file should give you the following files:

(to make it easier to launch I extracted the files to c:\ltcminer\)

Step 3: Setting up the mining pool

If you are solo mining you can skip this and proceed to step 4.

For pooled mining you’ll need a mining_proxy which supports the Stratum protocol. Get the windows binary here or here and place it in the same folder; c:\ltcminer. The source code is available here for other platforms than windows. Your c:\ltcminer\ folder should now look like this:

In order to mine with a pool you’ll have to register an account. I will be using coinotron in this guide.

Go to https://www.coinotron.com/coinotron/AccountServlet?action=register

Now log in with your newly created account at https://www.coinotron.com/coinotron/AccountServlet?action=logon

Next, go to “my account” and add a worker, in this case 1 for username and password. Make sure LTC is selected under coin.

After you added it you should see the following:

Now you’ll have to start the mining proxy because poolers CPU miner doesn’t support the Stratum protocol. This can be done with the following command:

c:\ltcminer\mining_proxy -pa scrypt -o coinotron.com -p 3334

Step 4: Starting with mining

To start mining you have to use the following command, I prefer to run it from cmd so I can see any error might it occur. The number after -t stands for the amount of threads, I advise to set one for each core your cpu has, if it has hyperthreading you can see the virtual cores as normal ones also, there will be a small performance gain. The miner is set to low priority by default so it shouldn’t slowdown your computer.

Don’t forget to change the username and password to your own, you wouldn’t be the first one mining on my account

For pooled mining: c:\ltcminer\minerd -a scrypt -r 1 -t 4 -s 6 -o http://127.0.0.1:8332 -O cryptocur.1:1

For solo mining: c:\ltcminer\minerd -a scrypt -r 1 -t 4 -s 6 -o http://127.0.0.1:9332 -O username:password

For solo mining, if you have more computers, just follow step 2 and replace the ip (127.0.0.1) with the ip of your computer in the command to the computer running the litecoin client. This way you can connect a whole network of computers to mine on your wallet.

Here you can see the miner running, it shows the performance per thread, in this case 4 and the total hashrate when your first work is accepted. Here I’m mining at 34.17 khash/s.

If everything is running smoothly you can create shortcuts on your desktop by just right clicking your desktop and going to New->Shortcut

Now just paste the commands in there and create the shortcut

Now you should easily be able to start mining with your cpu from your desktop.

You should be mining by now! Anything missing or any questions? Leave a comment below. If you want more hashing power the Radeon 7950 is currently the most energy efficient card, you can find a lot of them on sale here.

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