Litecoin wallet encryption

Crypto-currency price has skyrocketed lately and Litecoin seems to have appreciated even more than Bitcoin with a 400% increase in value over the span of last month. If you are not familiar with Litecoin yet, it is a decentralized digital peer-to-peer currency used over internet based off the concepts of the popular Bitcoin. Litecoin runs on the network of users that employ it. Compared to Bitcoin where transaction confirmations takes 10 minutes, Litecoin has a faster confirmation time of 2.5 minutes. The number of Litecoins will reach its limit when 84 million is produced as opposed to Bitcoin’s limit of 21 million, and it’s projected that it won’t occur until 2040.

Litecoin uses a scrypt based algorithm, unlike Bitcoin’s SHA-256.The scrypt algorithm is more reliant on memory, not processing efficiency. That is the reason those specialized hardwares developed for Bitcoin mining will not work with Litecoin and making GPU mining more effective. At the moment, the most efficient card to mine Litecoin is AMD Radeon 7950 with the best hash per watt ratio.

Litecoin mining guide – GPU mining

Not all graphics cards support mining, but medium range and above graphics card which is bought within the last 3 years should be able to mine. Before starting, make sure that your graphics card drivers are up to date. ATI and AMD cards will need the AMD-APP-SDK that can be downloaded here.

Step 1 : Create a wallet

To start mining crypto-coins, you will need a wallet to store the digital currency. The client could be downloaded from the official Litecoin site. Choose and download the Litecoin client for your operating system then proceed to install it. The client will synchronize with the network to download the blockchain which contains all transactions ever performed. Remember it runs on the network of its users? It will take fairly long, so let it run while we move on.