What are Litecoin Mining Pools?

| Updated
by Andy Watson · 2 min read
What are Litecoin Mining Pools?
Photo: Brendan Lim / Flickr

Litecoin mining pool is a group of Litecoin miners that combine their resources so that they can find blocks faster.

Litecoin mining is the process of using computer’s CPU (Central Processing Unit) and GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to process transactions for the Litecoin network. By doing this you can attempt to solve a ‘block’ which pays out a reward. Currently the Litecoin reward per block is 50 Litecoins.

Unlike Bitcoin, CPUs can still contribute enough hashing power to be significant to Litecoin, though this may quickly change. In fact, this was one of the original design features of Litecoin. Because Litecoin uses a scrypt encryption algorithm there is a much smaller efficiency gap between CPU mining and GPU mining. For this reason the Litecoin client still has a built in CPU mining program.

Another important concept of modern mining is pool mining. A mining pool is a group of miner’s that pool their resources together so that they can find blocks faster. The reward is then split between the pool members based on their contributions. This tutorial uses Coinotron mining pool along with GUIMiner Scrypt and assumes Windows 7 or 8 as an operating system.

The Best Litecoin Mining Pools

This guide lists all known mining pools along with many of the important details needed to choose a Litecoin pool which best suits you.

It is usually a requirement to register an account on the pool, and configure your workers on the pool’s portal account pages before mining. Each pool may have different payment methods–select the method which works best for you.

Name Reward Fee % Launch Forum Location VDF STX STR LB SSL BFR
OzCoin DGM/POT 2 2011-10-17 Link US Yes No Yes No Yes  ?
Pool-X PPLNS 3 2011-10-17 Link FR No No Yes No No  ?
litecoinpool.org PPS 4 2011-11-05 Link UKUS-NYUS-CA, TOR Yes No Yes Yes Yes  ?
P2Pool PPLNS 0 2011-11-07 Link P2P Yes Yes Yes No No  ?
burnside’s PPLNS 0 2012-07-15 Link US No No Yes No No  ?
GiveMeCoins PPLNS 0 2013-03-11 Link US-AZFR Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes  ?
NetcodePool PPLNS 2 2013-04-06 Link US Yes No Yes No No  ?
Hypernova CPPSRB 1 2013-04-28 Link US, FR No Yes Yes Yes Yes  ?
LiteBonk PPLNS 0 2013-04-29 Link US No No Yes No No  ?
MiningPool PPLNS 0 2013-05-01 Link NL No No No No No  ?
Share:
guides