FAQs
Would Litecoin mining be profitable for me?
Short answer: not if you intend to use GPUs or CPUs, even if you don\'t pay for electricity.
Long answer: it depends on many factors, including your hardware, the cost of electricity and cryptocurrency market prices. In practice, nowadays you can only make a profit by using ASIC (application-specific) hardware.
Can I use a Bitcoin ASIC miner to mine Litecoin/Dogecoin?
No, you will need an ASIC designed to mine the Scrypt algorithm. Litecoin and Bitcoin use two very different hashing algorithms (scrypt and SHA-256d, respectively).
What fee do you charge?
The nominal PPLNS fee is 1% for both Litecoin and Dogecoin. This fee is factored directly into the PPLNS rate at which submitted shares are rewarded, so you won\'t ever need to send us fee payments.
There are no additional fees. In particular, we do not charge a fee for payouts.
What is merged mining?
Merged mining is a technique that allows miners to mine multiple compatible cryptocurrencies, such as Litecoin and Dogecoin, simultaneously. This is unrelated to what “profit-switching” pools do. For this reason, merged mining does not cause sudden difficulty spikes and does not harm any of the involved networks.
Is there anything I need to do to allow merged mining?
No, the pool takes care of merged mining automatically. No special configuration is needed on the miner's side.
Do you mine other Scrypt coins as well?
If it can be merge-mined with Litecoin and it is profitable to do so, then we are probably already mining it. These additional merge-mined cryptocurrencies are paid out directly to users.
Can I use the same worker name and password for more than one physical miner?
Yes, but if you use different workers it is easier to track your miners' performance. Your expected rewards will be the same either way.
What happens if I reset a worker?
A reset resets all of a worker's counters and statistics: shares, blocks, partial rewards and hash rate averages, including the hash rate history displayed in the charts. It does not affect an account's rewards or global statistics.
What is a share?
A share is a unit of reward that miners earn by submitting proofs of work (the result of hashing) to the pool. The term “share” originates from the reward system of proportional pools, whose total earnings are distributed among miners in proportion to the number of shares they submit. In a PPS (pay-per-share) system, shares are paid directly to miners, independently of how many blocks the pool actually finds.
What is network difficulty?
Network difficulty is a number (currently about 81,276,642) that gives an indication of how difficult it is to find a block. The Litecoin network automatically adjusts its difficulty every few days so that blocks are found on average every 2.5 minutes. This means that the more hashing power is on Litecoin, the harder it is to find a block.
What is share difficulty?
Share difficulty is a number that gives an indication of how difficult it is to find a share. The lower this number, the more shares a miner will find at a given speed, and the lower their value. For this reason, share difficulty does not affect miners' expected earnings.
Why does the pool report more shares than my miner?
This pool serves variable-difficulty work units, so when you solve a share the pool counts it with multiplicity, according to its difficulty. For example, if you solve a share that is four times as difficult as the baseline share, it gets counted as four shares.
Why variable-difficulty (“vardiff”) shares?
The technique of adapting the difficulty to each miner's hash rate allows the pool to measure workers' speed more precisely while keeping bandwidth usage optimal.
How does share difficulty influence my earnings?
Short answer: it doesn\'t.
Long answer: a higher/lower share difficulty does not mean you will be earning more/less, because your expected earnings are independent of the share difficulty: they only depend on your hash rate and on the network difficulty. A higher share difficulty can only increase the variance, but not in a significant way.
How do idle worker notifications work?
You have the option to let the pool monitor your workers and notify you with an email when they go idle. Monitoring can be enabled separately for each of your workers, so if you wish you can have the pool monitor only a subset of your miners. If multiple workers go idle simultaneously (within one minute), you will only receive one email listing all of them. You will not receive further notifications for any given worker until it starts submitting shares again, and in any case not before 15 minutes have elapsed since the last notification.
Can I use an exchange address for payouts?
While technically possible, we advise against using addresses provided by exchanges or other third-party services. One of the main problems is that you do not fully control these addresses, and in particular if a problem arises you usually have no way to prove that you are the legitimate owner. If you decide to use a third-party address anyway, we strongly recommend that you do not lock the address.
Why am I not receiving payouts?
The exact conditions for payout are listed on your Payments page. Note in particular that, for your own security, whenever a payout address is modified all payouts to it are suspended for 24 hours.