Litecoin Mining

When we told our mom that we wanted to become a miner after graduation, she thought that was a little weird, but she went ahead and bought us a hard hat and some work boots anyway. “Not that kind of miner, lol,” we said, and traded in the hat and books for a sweet computer setup.

Yeah...we’re not interested in mining precious metals. We’re interested in mining Litecoin, a super popular—and potentially super profitable—cryptocurrency.

How does it work? Well, in a nutshell, we (or, more accurately, our computers) are charged with solving complex math problems using algorithms. The first miner to solve the problem is rewarded with Litecoin, and our solutions are added to the Litecoin blockchain. All we need is a computer, internet access, electricity, an e-wallet, and the Litecoin mining software.

It sounds simple enough, but Litecoin mining can be really expensive and highly competitive. Being a Litecoin miner means we have to not only have a fast and reliable computer setup and a top-speed internet connection, but we also are going to be using a ton of electricity. The script required to mine these little nuggets of awesome uses a ton of processing power and can drive our utility costs through the roof. That’s why a lot of Litecoin mining is done by large corporations with access to cheap electricity: they can typically afford a much better setup than we can as individuals, and they’ll also pay a lot less to run the mining software. Plus, since they have such a powerful setup, they can usually solve the math problems faster than we can, which means they’re a lot more likely to end up “winning” the Litecoin processing battle.