So my attempt to mine bitcoins failed up until now. I received some µBtc through bitvisitor but that’s it. But upon my quest I stumbled upon the fact that Bitcoins are not the only cryptocurrency. Litecoins, Namecoins, and if you go to exchange sites you see even more abbreviations for other coins. Most of them are a fork of Bitcoin but use the same principles. A nice post I stumbled upon gives a good summary on this topic. Read it here at reddit.
One big drawback of bitcoins is that mining is getting harder and special equipment is needed to really be able to mine effectively. The main reason for this is the algorithm used for mining bitcoins is based on SHA256 which apparently is very suited for creating custom FPGAs and ultimately ASICs. The downside is that normal people do not have an ASIC laying around in the attic! Buying them means a significant amount of investment for equiment which can only be used to compute hashes based on SHA256, nothing else!
Litecoins are developed to overcome the problem where special equiment is needed for mining by using a different hashing algorithm called Scrypt. Apparently (I do not know the details of Scrypt or SHA256 for that matter) the idea was that Scrypt is not suitable for GPU, FPGA or ASICs. This, however proved to be partially wrong as GPU’s are currently widely used to mine Litecoins. However, there have not yet been developed any specific FPGA or ASIC devices for Litecoin mining.
The next step for me was therefor to create a Litecoin wallet and see if I start mining for these coins.
Finally this proved to be much easier. Although I do mine in a pool (coinotron) I got mining running immediately with cpuminer. My Laptop is offcourse no performance beast, but at least I can see things happen. Now I need to start learning what all the figures mean and I also need to look into GPU mining.
But for now at least things are working!
ninigiku 