ViaBTC | Mining LTC: How Long Does it Take to Mine One Litecoin?
According to the latest survey released by CouponFollow, Litecoin has become the third most popular cryptocurrency among consumers when it comes to the desired rewards of crypto credit cards. Additionally, it is only slightly less popular than Ethereum (41%), the №2 crypto on the list. As one of the most popular cryptos out there, Litecoin has earned the favor of many miners.
Despite that, ViaBTC also noticed that many miners are not that familiar with Litecoin, and a big part of them are senior LTC miners who have been mining the coin for over one year. As one of the earliest cryptocurrencies, Litecoin is almost as popular as Ethereum. Like the two biggest cryptos (BTC and ETH), LTC also deserves a more in-depth understanding.
To help you better understand LTC, we will start from the principles of LTC mining and see how LTC is mined and how long it takes to mine a single Litecoin. Before we go into any of these topics, let’s first explain the great popularity of LTC.
Litecoin’s similarity to Bitcoin is a major reason behind its popularity. Inspired by Bitcoin, former Google software engineer named Charlie Lee created Litecoin in November 2011. It copied Bitcoin’s core codes but solved some of the problems facing Bitcoin. Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm, which shortens the block time (2.5 minutes on average) by 75% compared with the SHA256 algorithm of Bitcoin, which jacked up the LTC supply to 84 million, 4 times larger than that of BTC.
Thanks to its faster block time and confirmation, lower transaction fees, and larger block capacity, Litecoin is more suitable for small, everyday transactions than Bitcoin. In addition, the adoption of the Scrypt algorithm also makes it impossible for Bitcoin ASIC miners to mine Litecoin, which boosts the security performance of the Litecoin network. Of the many BTC altcoins out there, Litecoin, ranking 21st by market cap, has become one of the most popular cryptos in the world relying on its strong capabilities and consensus.
How LTC is mined
Like BTC mining, LTC mining is also a hashing process where miners engage in massive computations with mining machines. The first miner who identifies the correct answer will win the corresponding block reward from the LTC network, as well as the right to package the relevant transactions. That said, as the LTC hashrate has kept rising, the theoretical block rate of the most advanced LTC mining machine only stands at 0.0023%, making mining pools the first choice of most LTC miners.
*Block rate = mining machine hashrate/network hashrate; in the following case, the mining machine hashrate (AntMiner L7) stands at 9.5G, while the network hashrate is 410TH/s.
Connecting mining machines to a pool (ViaBTC Pool in the case below) normally involves the following steps:
1. First, acquire a mining machine that supports LTC mining such as AntMiner L7 and Innosilicon A6;
2. Select a payment method for LTC mining in ViaBTC Pool (e.g. PPS+ and PPLNS);
3. Set up the mining address; there are three addresses available to LTC miners in ViaBTC Pool (if miners fail to get connected to one address, they will be automatically switched to another):
stratum+tcp://ltc.viabtc.io:3333
stratum+tcp://ltc.viabtc.io:25
stratum+tcp://ltc.viabtc.io:443
4. Set up the miner name and password (e.g. account name: viabtc, miner name: viabtc.001, password: skip or enter any password)
5. After the connection is established, wait for 10–15 minutes of stable operation, and then log in to the ViaBTC website to check the status and yield of the mining machine.
6. Finally, withdraw your mining profits. ViaBTC allows miners to make four types of withdrawals: Auto Withdraw, Normal Transfer, Inter-user Transfer, and Transfer to CoinEx. In particular, apart from Normal Transfer, all other withdrawals require zero fees.
How long does it take to mine a single Litecoin?
The time it takes to mine one LTC depends on many factors, such as the mining machine used, the LTC difficulty, and the block reward. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin also features a halving mechanism that cuts the block reward by 50% every four years. The earliest block reward of LTC was 50 LTC, and the current reward stands at 12.5 LTC.
Furthermore, the mining machine also has a major impact on the time required to mine one LTC. Based on the current LTC difficulty (14.63M), we can expect the following mining yields from different mining machine models:
On August 3, the official Twitter account of Litecoin announced that around this time next year (early August 2023), Litecoin will go through its next halving. By then, the block reward will drop from 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC. As of August 5, 2022, 84.37% of the LTC supply has been mined, which means that over 70 million litecoins are circulating in the market, with only less than 14 million to be mined.
Many miners wonder whether LTC mining would become worthless when all litecoins are mined. The answer is no. When that day comes, miners could still validate blocks and process and package the transaction information even if there is no block reward. By then, miner fees will constitute their only source of profits. Therefore, Litecoin and LTC mining will remain valuable as long as people are still making LTC transfers.
