Litecoin Mining

Reflection

Sometime back in 2013, crypto-mining was all the rage. Fun operations turned into devops management, as my winter turned into a summer. What else did I get out of it though?

It was not terribly fun when you look at the stress/effort vs the eventual returns, tt was a break-even at best. Efficiency decreased rapidly with the introduction of ASIC miners into the market.

Well, at least I'm left with useful parts for gaming and OpenCL experimentation.

GPU Method

Equip List

Cost calculated with estimated depreciation over 3 years.

  • $20.8 - 0.5 Years Old, $25 - ASUS M5A97 LE
  • $91.6 - 0.5 yrs, $110 - HIS HD7770
  • $55.97 - 1 yr, $83.96 - HIS HD7750
  • $270 - PowerColor HD7950
  • $210 - MSI Twin Frozr 3 7950
  • $147.80 - FX-4300, 2GB RAM
  • $80 - TopDeck station
  • $15 - 530w server psu
  • Subtotal: $891.17
  • Free stuff - Old PSUs, thumbdrives, etc

Estimated Hashrate:

  • 7750: 150 kH
  • 7770: 160 kH
  • 7770: 160 kH
  • 2 x 7950: 600 kH (now 1.2GH after cooling upgrade)
  • Total: 1670 kH

ROI:

  • @ 596.887 difficulty, 1.84 LTC/day, 55.1 LTC/mth, 670.89 LTC/yr
  • @ 3.198994 $/h : $176.26/mth
  • @ 0.02844 btc/ltc : 1.567 BTC
  • ROI: 2.4 to 4.5 mths
  • 6/20/2013: 47.61 LTC/mth, ~ $106/mth, ROI ~8mth
  • Due to LTC surge, cost recovered.

Resources:

  • Litecoin Mining Hardware Comparison
  • https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/wiki/Mining-hardware-comparison
  • Litecoin Mining Calculator
  • http://www.litecoinminingcalculator.com
  • LTC Exchange
  • https://btc-e.com/exchange/ltc_usd

FPGA Method [Abandoned]

Equip List

$330 - Altera DE2-115 demo board

Coding in verilog, systemverilog

Goal is to implement Scrypt in FPGA, proof of concept to evaluate kHash/sec and estimate ROI.

Resources

  • Scrypt .c/.h
  • https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/blob/master/src/scrypt.c