What is mining and why Litecoin?

Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that is commonly known as the “Silver to bitcoin’s gold.” It has faster transaction speeds and less fees. It also has four times as many coins.

Mining is the process of verifying transactions on the network. Miners are rewarded for solving complex mathematical problems by attempting millions of “nonces” per second. The first machine to guess the correct nonce gets the reward of 25 Litecoins. Miners often work together in what are known as pools in order to have a higher chance of guessing the correct nonce. The rewards are then distributed amongst the pool depending on how much hashing power each user provided.

Litecoin can be mined with CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs. ASIC miners are the most powerful cryptocurrency miners on the market. The Antminer L3+ miner was designed specifically for a type of mining that uses the Scrypt algorithm. At the time of this post it is the most powerful Litecoin miner on the market, with 504 MH/s. That’s 504 million hashes per second.

Setting up an L3+

In order to set up this rig you need a few things:

• Antminer L3+ miner
• Power supply (I used the APW3++ from Bitmain)
• An ethernet cable
• A power cable for the power supply

After you have all your supplies, you need to attach your power supply to the miner. There are eight PCI slots on the hashing boards. There is also one more near the front for the main control board.

Once you have all your power cords connected, plug your ethernet cord into the front of the miner and attach it to a router or switch,

Now plug in the power supply and wait a few minutes for the miner to start up. It will start loud, get quiet for about 30 seconds, and then get loud again.

Now you need to locate your miner on the local network. Download an app that will allow you to scan your network and see the IP addresses of all the devices connected.

Once you have this IP address, type it into the address bar of your smartphone or computer. The default username and password are “root” when you get prompted.

Now you should change your password. Go to System > Administration and type a new password.

Next you need to sign up for a mining pool. I personally used litecoinpool.org because I heard it gives some of the best returns.

Now go to Miner Configuration and erase all of the default mining pools. Enter in the miner information from your pool’s site as the first one. I would recommend getting 3 different pools so that when one fails it will start mining on the next in the list. Save your changes. I won’t show that here for security reasons.

You should now be all set. Your L3+ is mining Litecoin.