Can I mine Litecoins?

[AraSarkisyan]

I have overclocked 6850 @ 925mhz and a fx 6300 @ 4.1. YOu think I can mine Litecoins?

 

[mvitkun]

Bitcoin and Litecoin mining is more for people who

-have large amounts of graphics cards

-have large amounts of servers that operate at little to no cost to them

 

you really can't make much money on an average pc.

[Notaek]

Yes, but I wouldn't recommend it.  i would mine a different coin. 

 

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/?sha256HashRate=2400.00&sha256Power=900.00&sha256PowerCost=0.3600&scryptHashRate=2400.00&scryptPower=900.00&scryptPowerCost=0.3600

 

That is a list of the most profitable coins.

 

For your hardware, you will be fine mining any coin with the scrypt algorithm.  Note that all of the settings for your hardware will be the same on any scrypt coin, the only difference between mining a coin like digitalcoin instead of litecoin is that you have to join a digitalcoin pool.

[RuecanOnRails]

Yes you can mine Litecoin on your GPU. 

http://litecoin.info/Mining_Hardware_Comparison

 

You're looking at about 270 Khash.

https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=270&difficulty=883.75646448

 

Don't expect to make too many. It might cost more to keep your computer running than the amount of coins you can make. Consider buying coins based on how much electricity would be used to mine per month. While mining your computer will likely be useless for any tasks.

 

 

As for recommendations to mine other Scrypt based coins. You can hop blockchains as much as you like. But in order to do that, you need to keep a constant watch on the network hash, difficulty, and take the stale rate into consideration.

What I mean by that is, Litecoin blocks are solved at every 2.5 minutes on average. Every time a block is solved on the network it will take time for that information to make it to your pool, then send you the new block data. In the time it take for your computer to see the new block and begin working in it, your computer has been working on the old now "stale" block which is work that gets thrown out.

Coins such as digitalcoin (DGC) has a very fast solve rate which increases the amount of stales dramatically. To the point where you could be loosing 40% of your hash by mining stale blocks. The stale rate also increases if the network hash quickly jumps in speed from others block chain hopping.

 

A lot of the new "scam" coins offer very fast confirms. most of them fail to mention that they come at the cost of stales and wasted hash.

http://coinchoose.com/

 

There's a site for profitability on multiple coins. It does show a slight compensation for stale rates. DGC for example is 179.89% profitable over bitcoin.. However after you adjust for stales it's only 135.59%. If the network hash is moving faster than the target the stale rate is higher than what's shown.