Litecoin miners, time to pull the plug?

**dugimodo** · 24-03-2014, 11:01 AM

So for anyone still mining Litecoins, are you making any money currently? Mining on litecoinpool.org has increased in difficulty so that I'm making about $1 a week after power costs, just not worth it. I've improved things by using a multi coin pool that auto switches to whatever coin is most profitable for the last few weeks but that's not helping much. I'm thinking it may be time to give it up. Anyone have any suggestions, feedback?

At best I was getting about 1LTC a day, currently down to < 0.5. I'm thinking I might shut it all down this week. I had thought it might work out as free heating for the winter if it maintains break even status but with stories of ASICs on the horizon and steadily increasing network difficulty I think maybe not.

Power usage is about 1300W, hashrate is 2700KH/s. I was using less power for a while but I had to go back to factory voltages for stability. The ironic thing is just as the profit margin disappears I seem to have sorted out all my niggling stability issues and have had a week of non stop uninterrupted mining. I did wonder if it's simply the dropping temperatures as we move out of summer that has improved my stability. My fallback pool used to show regular spikes every day also but has not been used for 3 days now.

**Chilling_Silence** · 24-03-2014, 12:02 PM

I'm currently sitting ~1800kH/sec for 760watt roughly on my miner.

I'm the same, stability has been all over the show, and the difficulty has skyrocketed the last couple of weeks.

I've been mining DigiBytes on my desktop too now for a couple of days, it looks promising.

**Chilling_Silence** · 25-03-2014, 01:27 PM

Wait have you been cashing yours in immediately or are you mining with 6-months down the track in mind? I presume at that rate / power usage you have 2-3 rigs?

**dugimodo** · 25-03-2014, 02:13 PM

I have 2 rigs and I've been cashing in every week. If you want to speculate on the price 6 months from now you may as well just buy the coins rather than mine them.
At the very least I'd want to recover my power costs once a month.

**Chilling_Silence** · 25-03-2014, 03:21 PM

I can mine them for less than I can sell them, at current prices though... So might as well keep that up huh?

It's been ~5 weeks for me, currently sitting on 25 LTC. Would rather sit on them for a while and see how things go in a few months. Not a lot of point selling at the current low, after the Mt.Gox scare affected BTC.

**Nick G** · 25-03-2014, 03:38 PM

At the risk of sounding totally uneducated (coz I am about mining coins

) - if the price of BTC is currently low, couldn't you convert LTC to that, then convert BTC to NZD later when BTC rises in value? Potentially making a overall profit even if LTC is unprofitable based on power consumption vs LTC to NZD?

**icow** · 25-03-2014, 03:40 PM

Yes, there is an obvious risk associated with that though.

**dugimodo** · 25-03-2014, 03:55 PM

Well if you are looking at it as an investment possibly, but at current prices my earning after power is less that $2-$3 a week so only very slightly cheaper than buying the coins.

Mt Gox only really dropped the price for a week or so, it did plummet under $10 for LTC at one point but it's been hovering around $14-$16 for quite some time and was before mt gox as well. BTC has been fairly consistant also. It's possible you may get some growth over the next 12 months but I think the huge leaps in value are behind us, oh to have a time machine and start mining a year earlier. If anything if you look at the charts and ignore the 2 weeks around Mt Gox LTC has shown a steady drop in price for a few months.

Mining them has to pay for the hardware and the power usage, buying them doesn't. Since I started in Dec I've had about $1200 in pay outs from LTC and was getting $25/LTC to begin with. I spent around $3k on hardware and about $500 so far in power so I've made back about 1/3 of what I've spent and earnt somewhere from 60-80 LTC (I'm curious now I'll check later). If I just bought $3500 in LTC and hung onto it today I'd have around 180 LTC and if I'd done it to begin with I'd have about 140 and would have lost $900 so far.

In order for mining to be worth while you have to be able to do it at less than the cost of power and /or the cost of simply buying the coins for long enough to pay off the hardware or you have to hope for a large rise in value, it's a gamble.

**dugimodo** · 25-03-2014, 04:05 PM

Sure Nick except LTC & BTC seem joined at the hip, LTC value tracks BTC almost perfectly so when BTC is low so is LTC. In other words buying 25 LTC worth of BTC now will likely result in a very similar amount of BTC as it will in 6 months so the only gain to be had is if the value of both rises or if you do as you suggest and BTC starts rising independantly of LTC - which hasn't happened apart from a very occasional spike.

There are a lot of people playing the crypto coin market like they do the money market, just trying to buy low and sell high. Because it varies wildy at times you can make money very quickly but it's very unpredictable and you can lose it just as fast.

I've been converting all my LTC to BTC before selling for $NZD and if you calculate the LTC - USD - NZD rate then compare it to the LTC - BTC - NZD rate you'll see it's pretty much always the same (no one buys LTC for NZD that I can find)

**Chilling_Silence** · 25-03-2014, 04:21 PM

Nah I've not found anybody buying LTC for USD either.

That's odd you're only making that much, my power isn't a lot yet I'm still bringing in roughly 4 coins a week at the moment. That means just the 1 weeks worth has paid for a whole months power it's utilizing (Roughly $70 a month).