Litecoin-qt Bootstrap / Dogecoin hashrate wallet

Coin mining is a fun hobby but there is a lot of useless, disorganized information about it on the wikis. It could take you a while to get started. Even after two weeks of mining I’m fixing up some of my beginner’s mistakes. So I made this guide; a simple, straightforward way to get you mining and avoid my mistakes. I’m not going into details; it’s a bootstrap to get you going asap so you can learn the rest on your own.

1. Can I make money?

If you don’t research on your own you will burn as much money into electricity as you earn in coins. is a good income calculator (but the owner has been MIA for a week now ). If you don’t know what numbers to plug in, use you computer’s power supply wattage and 330 kH/s (an average of the top 5 most efficient cards). That’s a reasonable scenario; your average game computer may make only 30$ a month after paying for electricity and that doesn’t cover wear. Still, interesting hobby if it’s not all expenses!

2. What to mine?

Litecoins (LTC). Unless you have dedicated mining hardware, LTCs are currently more profitable to mine.

3. What bare minimum do I need?

Always-on Internet. Doesn’t have to have a big data plan.

10+ gb of Hard Disk space to keep the entire blockchain. You don’t want something that big on your SDD so use your storage HD.

litecoin-qt from You could get an online wallet or download a light wallet that doesn’t need the whole blockchain, but this is the reference implementation, and you’ll need the blockchain if you want to solo mine or p2pool later.

A cool room and a well-cooled machine. Miners gets very hot and noisy, but can be any old computer as long as it has a PCIe x16 port and 2+ gigs of ram. It’s the GPU that does all the work in LTC mining.

An up to date executable of cgminer from If you don’t want to compile cgminer yourself, you might have a hard time finding downloadable executables. Read the forum, someone is bound to have made them available – and tell you about trojans to avoid. Do run an antivirus on anything you download anyway.