Litecoin-qt using 100 CPU

A bunch of my coworkers and I have been looking into crypto currencies for fun. Between figuring out who can get the most hashes per second, watching the markets, and just looking through the source code of the clients, it’s been fun looking at it during out downtime.

One of the hardest things to get past is all the terminology and software that you need to setup in order to actually USE a crypto currency. This post is an attempt to make a tutorial on how to use Dogecoin, which is a fork of the Litecoin project, itself a fork of the bitcoin project.

Terminology

• Bitcoin – The “original” crypto currency. Uses SHA256 algorithm. Hard to mine unless using specialized hardware
• Litecoin – A new crypto currency that uses the scrypt algorithm. Able to mine using cpus and videocards.
• Dogecoin – Such coin! Much wow! An alt coin that is a fork of litecoin and based on the shibu inu doge meme. A fun crypto currency, easy to mine and learn with.
• SHA256 – The algorithm used by bitcoin. CPUs and GPU based hashing have been replaced by specialized hardware dedicated to this algorithm.
• scrypt – the algorithm used by altcoins (litecoin, dogecoin). Scrypt is designed to be mined only with cpus and gpus. Dedicated hardware is said to be “impossible” due to the way it’s designed.
• wallet – a program or website that has unique address and is connected to the blockchain.
• minerd – a program used to cpu mine.
• cgminer – a program used to gpu mine with ATI cards (previous versions only) or dedicated hardware (for bitcoin).
• cudaminer – A program to gpu mine with nVidia cards.
• pool – a group of individuals all mining together to pool together resources and share in the mined coins.
• block chain - a list of all transactions. every wallet syncs up to each other and keeps a log of all transactions. when you send coins to an address, every wallet syncs up, and the wallet with the correct address receives the coins. depending on the coin, it could take minutes to days to sync up 100%.
• workers - a name associated with your account that you use to mine with. You make a worker for each computer you will be mining with. for example, my username is shea. I have 2 workers, one for each computer. worker one is named red, worker two is named green.