The hardware is off-the-shelf and can be used for other purposes or sold if one should decide to re-purpose the investment. This article is about building is a GPU-based rig that can be used to mine Litecoin and similar coins that use Scrypt and algorithms similar to Scrypt such as Scrypt-N. ASICs have no other purpose but to mine coins with the same hashing algorithm of Bitcoin which is SHA256 and have little resale value or usefulness once time has passed and the speed of new technology has replaced them. Bitcoin mining is all on ASICs now and new versions of ASICs are appearing for Litecoin and other coins. There is a great effort in the coin community to keep some coins on GPUs where a person can purchase off the shelf graphics cards and be part of cryptocurrency.ĪSICs aka Application Specific Integrated Circuits - These are very specialized circuits designed for speed and efficiency. Bitcoin has since moved past graphics cards in processing power, but Litecoin and many other variations run on GPUs using a hashing algorithm call Scrypt. GPU aka the graphics card that typically is used to display games - High-end graphics cards lend well to heavy processing and cryptography.
Gpu mining litecoin faucet software#
There are a few coins that are written in software that continue to run only on CPU. It is divided among a few different hardware platforms that have come about during the evolution of the technology.ĬPU aka the main chip on the computer motherboard that does most all of the processing - Bitcoin began here. Regardless of reason for interest in cryptocurrency, the hardware is pretty much the same. Cryptocurrency technologies can be used to store data with their transactions, and many applications of the technology are sure to develop in the near future that are far beyond what is currently advertised as a replacement for traditional money transactions. These are cryptocurrencies, a distributed, decentralized, secure set of technologies making their appearance as coins. Maybe you have heard of Litecoin or Dogecoin.