Guide to mining LiteCoins from scratch! Both cgminer and GUIminer version

Official_Litecoin_Logo_With_Text

Howsit Guys.

I know this post doesn’t directly relate to gaming but there’s a lot of questions going around and I though a decent guide would help.

I have used info from a couple of guides I have found useful around the interwebs. There’s plenty of info if you Google it but it’s so easy to get lost too.

I’ve decided to make a step by step guide, many people since the skyrocket of Bitcoins have decided to look at mining Litecoins as it’s something one can do on a regular home or gaming system.

1. Firstly, DOWNLOAD and install the latest version of the LiteCoin wallet! Get it from the official site. Link –>  www.litecoin.org

litecoin wallet

 

NB: AVOID online wallets,they can be hacked and are not really very trusted. I have had my wallet of Bitcoins hacked back in the day and trust me it blows.
Always keep your coins in your wallet, and make sure to backup your wallet as well!! Don’t be that guy we all saw on the news who threw out 7500 Bitcoins.

Have you grabbed the wallet? Installed it?
Sweet now run it, let it sync(it could take several hours to do the first sync, dont worry) and find your unique LiteCoin address in the Receive tab! It should look something like this:

litecoin application

Copy and paste your address somewhere, preferably with the copy address button! We are going to need this in a bit later.

Lets move to step 2!

2. You will need some descent GPUs to mine LiteCoins. You could mine with CPUs as well(don’t) but its highly NOT recommended.

The difficulty now is so big and your hashrate will be too low that you will end up burning electricity for nothing. While both AMD and NVIDIA cards can mine litecoins, I highly recommend  AMD, since they mine faster. Beeg time.

Here is a link to the mining hardware comparison:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

The two favourites at the moment are the GigaByte 7950 card and the HIS 7950 ones, but literally any model/brand will do the job. Got the cards? Wicked!

Important: it’s good to know what your expected mining capabilities are with your given hardware:

You can use any web based coin calculator, I personally use this one.

http://www.litecoinminingcalculator.com/

This willl show you what your daily, weekly, monthly amount of coins you can mine are. Helps when calculating profits over hardware expense.

Lets go to step 3!

3. VERY IMPORTANT!! Many people skip this, and they end up having bad results.
Download  AMD Catalyst 13.1 Software Suite Vista/7 64-bit AMD   AND AMD APP SDK v2.8
Link for AMD Catalyst 13.1 is here—>  http://www.guru3d.com/files_get/amd_catalyst_13_1_whql_download,1.html
and for AMD APP SDK v2.8 is here–>http://developer.amd.com/amd-license-agreement/?f=AMD-APP-SDK-v2.8-Windows-64.exe.
If for any reason the links go offline, just Google them and grab them from there. Install first the AMD Catalyst drivers, reboot, install the AMD SDK 2.8, reboot again. You are set.
On our way to step 4!

4. Drivers installed, Aight! Now we must create an account on the pool we want to use. Here is the link to all the good ones, take your pic.

https://litecoin.info/Mining_pool_comparison

For this guide I’ve used: http://wemineltc.com/
First of all, we visit the pools’ page and sign up. It should look similar to this:

mining pool signup

After filling everything correctly,you should see a screen like this images.weserv.nl

Now login with the new credentials you just created, by filling your username/password.

images.weserv.nl2

After logging in, go to account details

images.weserv.nl

There, you will need to request for an email code verification, in order to protect your account AND setup
your payout address(remember in Step1, we created our unique payment address!)! Put your PIN and ask for an email confirmation!

images.weserv.nl

You should see this on the upper screen

images.weserv.nl

 

After asking for the confirmation, go to your email you used for your registration. You should have an email there from WeMineLTC. open it.

images.weserv.nl

confirm

Perfect! Now we have the code! Lets go back to the Account Details page and lets put our payment address now

change

If done correctly, you should see payment change was made successfully.

Now, go create our first worker. Go to My Account–> My workers

workers

Set the password for your miner(doesnt have to be something difficult, 1234 will do just fine), leave the difficulty settings as is, and hit Update.

accounts

This will do you if you have one pc. In case you have more than one, you can create multiple workers, one for each PC, or you could point them all to the same worker, wont make any real difference. Usually people set one miner account per PC because it makes monitoring easier!

Lets move to the next step!

5. To actually mine LiteCoins, we need a mining software. At the moment, there are two that we could use. CGMiner and GUIminer. With simple words we could say GUIminer is cgminer with graphics, and cgminer is abit more”advanced” than GUIminer. More experienced users prefer cgminer while less experienced ones go for the GUIminer.

I will cover both, so you can make your own choice.

Before we proceed though, go to Getting Started–>New user info and you should see this screen with the pools’ current mining servers.

newuser

started

 

For our example, we will use the first one,

stratum+tcp://global.wemineltc.com:3334

You will find this in the getting started page !)

GUIminer version: First of all, be aware that GUIminer was originally developed to mine BITCOINS, and not LITECOINS.
What we will actually work with to mine litecoins is called GUIminer Alpha. Thats the one you need!
The original GUIminer CANNOT mine litecoins!
Ok, since we got that clear, lets start! Boom!

At first, we need to download latest version.
You can find latest version here –> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150331.0
Download and extract somewhere(for example, your desktop). You will end up with something like this:

miner

Locate guiminer.exe and run it. GUIminer will run, and will give you some fields to complete. In host, we put the server we chose WITHOUT HTTPS or tcp://  or port. So we will put global.wemineltc.com in Port we will put 3334, in username field we put our workers name(in our example, Tutorial.1) and the password we created for it( in our case, 1234). We make sure that the stratum box is ALWAYS on YES and we can select from some pre-defined settings for our GPUs!

In this case (illustration purpose only) , our miner has 2x GigaByte 7950 cards, so we selected that one, and it fills all the other fields like thread concurrency,worksize, vectors etc automatically.So we end up to something like this:

minerinfo

If you cannot see your card there listed, you can check the mining comparison wiki for litecoin and grab the settings for your cards here –>  https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison
Thats it! Hit Start, wait few seconds and you should see in awhile GUIminer counting shares.

tutorial

Congratulations, you are mining litecoins! Now you’r gonna be super rich… WOOOT! (maybe not but that’s the goal right)

CGMiner version : for the most experienced users, and the ones that want some more”flexibility” and stats, cgminer is the key! It may look abit more”complicated, but it really isnt that much when someone explains you what on Earth it is, and how to use it! So lets start!

First of all, cgminer developer, for his own reasons, decided to STOP support for LiteCoin mining, so the latest versions DO NOT support LTC mining. Thus, we will stick to 3.5 version.
Go here –>  http://ck.kolivas.org/apps/cgminer/3.5/ and get 3.5 version

cgiminer

Save to desktop, and extract.
Navigate in the folder, right click and create a new text document.

cgiminer2

In the first two lines, paste those commands:
setx GPU_MAX_ALLOC_PERCENT 100
setx GPU_USE_SYNC_OBJECTS 1

And after that, this:
cgminer –scrypt -o stratum+tcp://global.wemineltc.com:3334 -u Tutorial.1 -p 1234 –thread-concurrency 24000 –lookup-gap 0 –gpu-engine 1100 –gpu-memclock 1250 –gpu-powertune 20 -w 256 -I 19 -g 1
After you write that, click Save As–> from the save as type select All Files and name it My Miner.bat Reason we name it with a .bat extension, is to make it executable and run cgminer with the parameters we wrote. Actually what I did here, is we give cgminer the command to run, in scrypt mode(thats the one litecoin uses), to connect in the server we said we would
use(stratum+tcp://stratum2.wemineltc.com:3335) , following by some parameters, like our username (-u), our miners password (-p), the thread concurrency of our cards, the look-gap command, where we want the gpu engine to run, where its memory clock, if we want to use the powertune option and how much, the workload(w), the Intensity of the card(I) and the number of threads per gpu(g). Those are the best settings that worked for us, for our GigaByte 7950s. You should find your own settings, again from the awesome guide over the litecoin hardware comparison wiki here –>  https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison  !

cgi3

Thats it! Double click the My Miner.bat and you are mining litecoins!

cgi4

Happy mining guys and gals.

If you have any questions or even suggestions leave them in the comment section please.