Litecoin restore wallet dat

One can use coinbase.com to purchase Bitcoin with cotton money, then transfer them to BTC-e or Cryptsy (or others, there are many exchanges, but do your research and avoid scams like OKCoin which was just busted for inflating their volumes), and you can trade BTC for LTC. Then transfer back to your home computer (you'll need to have set up a Litecoin wallet), and make sure you back up your computer or at least your wallet.dat.

The slower and somewhat more fun way, though, is to mine them. You can build a 1.5 MH/s (mega hashes per second) machine for about $2, 000: a motherboard, cheap CPU, some RAM (4 GB is plenty but I use 8), a cheap SATA drive (a USB flash drive can work also but I haven't experimented here), and a 1200W power supply; then add 3 x Radeon 7950s. Powered risers are also useful, and a custom case (I have seen expensive, and also milk crates or laundry baskets) for better airflow. This machine, at current rate, will pay for itself in about four months -- and, as the price for LTC seems to be on a rise (0.0336 BTC per LTC now; it was 0.026 a day or two ago, so that's a nice 20% rise in a couple days), and as it continues to rise the profitability will improve.

Bitcoin is the "first mover" and has some advantages due to this. One can use scrypt mining hardware (scrypt is the protocol Litecoin is mined under; SHA-256 is what Bitcoin uses), and "mine" Bitcoins, by using a mining pool that mines the most profitable scrypt coin, and converts them to Bitcoins on one of the exchanges, and then sends the Bitcoins directly to your wallet. The three I know of are multipool.us, hashco.ws, and middlecoin.com. I've only tried the latter, but I heard of hashco.ws recently and that it's more profitable than the others, so I intend to test it out.

You are right about 2014 gearing up to be huge for LTC. The important statistic: AMD can't make GPUs fast enough; the last two machines I put together, I had to buy the six 7950s from eBay, and paid around $350 a piece when I had been getting them from Amazon for $300 and under (plus you could sell the game that came with it on eBay to reduce the price further).