How can I participate in a mining pool that is mining Litecoins?

Question

To date I've only participated in mining GPU-optimised crypto currencies. I wondered what happens when I pointed my GPU miner to a Litecoin mining pool worker, Litecoin being designed to be optimised for CPU mining.

I tried do this for just three shares on coinotron.com and according to guiminer (running Phoenix) two of them were rejected as stale and one was accepted. However, my worker on coinotron.com registered no shares submitted at all (which is probably correct, since it's likely a GPU miner won't work at all for Litecoin).

If I can't use Phoenix, then what do I use to participate in a Litecoin mining pool?

Answer 1

Litecoin doesn't use the same algorithm as Bitcoin. Bitcoin hashes are SHA-256 based. Litecoin hashes are Scrypt based. GPU are very inefficient at processing Scypt based hashing algorithms. This algorithm was intentionally designed by crptographers to reduce the effectiveness of GPU in attempts to brute force Scypt hashed passwords.

You can't use phoenix (or any other Bitcoin miner) to mine Litecoin. You need to use a miner designed to hash Litecoin blocks using Scrypt algorithm. Litecoin CPU miners already exist. To use a GPU to mine Litecoin you would need a miner with GPU support. It is very unlikely that a GPU miner will ever be developed for Litecoin due to the low performance of GPUs.

It probable you would not even earn generate enough Litecoins to pay for the electrical consumption, and would earn far less than you would just mining Bitcoins for the same amount of time. This was done intentionally to make it uneconomical to use GPU on Litecoin blockchain.

Answer 2

You better off using your CPU to mine.

Basically, you should download an optimized litecoin miner, and point it to a pool.

See also this thread.

Answer 3

Indeed you can mine Litecoins with your GPU. Get CGMiner and register at coinat.com, start mining.