Litecoin wallet 64 bit

Over the past year Litecoin has solidified its place alongside Bitcoin as a viable digital currency. Accompanying increasing prices has been a deluge of new miners hoping to help run the Litecoin network and earn some coins. Traditionally Litecoin mining has been more efficient with Radeon GPUs, but recent improvements in mining software for NVIDIA cards has significantly increased their efficiency. No longer is cryptocurrency mining with graphics cards the sole territory of AMD/ATI/Radeon. So for all you NVIDIA card owners, here’s your guide to mining Litecoin with NVIDIA graphics cards on Windows as well as a brief overview of cryptocurrency mining.

If you’re brand new to Litecoin and don’t yet have a Litecoin wallet I’d suggest checking out our guide to Getting Started With Litecoin. It provides an overview of Litecoin and a guide to setting up a wallet. Also note that the following guide and mining software is compatible with other Scrypt based cryptocurrencies such as Feathercoin, Dogecoin and Worldcoin.

If you want to get started as quickly as possible with mining then skip ahead to the Installing GUI Miner Scrypt section.

Mining Basics

Litecoin mining is the process of using your computer’s resources in order to help run the Litecoin network. Like most cryptocurrencies, Litecoin is initially distributed through block rewards, where miner’s get a certain number of Litecoins by solving a certain amount of cryptographic work.

Originally mining could be done individually, referred to as solo mining. However, over time it became too difficult to do individually as the probability of finding a block solo mining became very low. This led groups of miners to develop what is referred to as pool mining. Today nearly all miners use pool mining, where they mine in groups resulting in steadier payouts.

Evolution of Cryptocurrency Mining

Originally Bitcoin was mined solely by CPUs (Central Processing Units). The original Bitcoin client included a CPU miner that beginners could use to solo mine. Eventually programs were developed that allowed users to mine with their computer’s GPUs (Graphics Processingi Units). GPUs offered much faster speeds than CPUs. Following GPU mining came the development of specialized hardware such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits).