Litecoin Mining Pools Review

The crypto world is really big, and there are plenty of coins to mine. Regardless of the coin, you choose to mine, try to join some of the biggest mining pools. Pick them by the hash rate distribution. You are certainly going to earn a lot if you join some of the bigger LTC pools. They are stable, ensure frequent earnings and have low limit payouts. Well, the downside, if you can even call it so, is the slightly higher fee, compared to the smaller pools.

Here is the list of suggestions for the top 5 LTC mining pools in comparison for a profitable outcome:

The information from my review is showing the main aspects of a mining pool. There are many other factors, that could affect your decision and change the mining outcome a bit. I’ve covered all of them as well in the “How to choose the right mining pool” guide.

I also want to point out one of the main things defining your Litecoin mining pool choice – the reward system. After all, we’re in it for the money. There are several methods, which determine how the reward from each mined block is divided between the pool’s participants. I won’t go into more details here, but I have prepared a separate page focusing on this – “Mining pools reward systems”. Have a look and make sure you make the best choice.

I want to draw your attention to an essential detail – the number of LTC mining pools you have joined. It is always a good idea to play it safe and be prepared in case your main pool is unreachable for some reason. This way you won’t be affected by any downtime.

Mining Pools Without Registration

In case the pool of your choice doesn’t require a registration, joining it is usually a simple procedure. This is in case you really value your privacy and you don’t want to give up any information when registering. I have prepared an updated list of Litecoin mining pools that don’t require registration:

There is no private information typed in the pool’s official website. Everything you do is from your PC and your miner, just enter all the information into your mining hardware/software.

The profit is the core idea behind mining cryptocurrencies. You can always check, if it’s worth using a Litecoin mining pool for the moment or not. The calculation will be accurate just for that particular moment, though. You can do it by using the clever, user-friendly calculator tool. All you need to do is enter your currency, hash rate, power consumption, electricity cost and pool fee. After that click the “calculate” button.

For those of you, picking cloud mining as an option, you can calculate your profits from that too. The required parameters are just two – pool fee and hash rate. The calculation is done, based on the current difficulty and market price values. However, keep in mind the variable nature of the numbers used.

The results can show your daily, weekly, monthly or yearly roundabout profit. You can also see the approximate amount of coins you will mine for each time period.

Mining is a time and resource consuming process, which would be quite impractical if you decide to do it alone. To have the needed hashing power for finding a block and be frequently rewarded, join a pool. This way you’ll get what you’ve worked for, no more or less. The payments are done after the pool takes a small share. It would be even more profitable if you create your own one. If you manage and maintain it, you can charge the participants for your services. You will also be helping for the decentralization of the mining power.

The process is not that easy. Here is the bare minimum for you to set up an LTC mining pool. Let’s start with the Virtual Private Server (VPS). You should have at least:

What’s even better is that even if you don’t have the needed hardware, you can rent a VPS server. This will enable you to install your mining pool software. This way you avoid the additional inconveniences like high electricity bills, running physical devices, downtime, and even bandwidth.

The leaders in the business with the best Litecoin mining pools are located mainly in Asia (China). The location is perfect, as most of the coins there can be mined with ASICs. Asia also provides low-cost electricity, which makes the hash rate distribution of the coin’s network steady and reasonable.

Most of the ASIC manufacturers are located in Asia, well in China in particular. The logical outcome is to have all their pools with local status. ASIC machines make the most sense when I talk about profitability in a Litecoin pool. Even when your hired hardware is in some other country, it is still directed to mine in some of the largest China pools.

Centralization of All LTC Mining Pools

The hash rate in the Litecoin network is fairly distributed among the pools for the moment of writing this article. This means that at least for the time being, the blockchain is safe from 51% attacks. Such attacks happen in the case of someone holding more than half of the hashing power. They can be very dangerous and damaging to the network, as whoever’s holding the majority of the power during such attacks, is abusing it for their own profit and is damaging the integrity of the chain. The best thing to do in case you see this occurring is to immediately abandon the Litecoin mining pool and join a smaller one.

Pool Distribution (calculated by blocks)

Pool	Hashrate Share
Ltc.top	22%
Antpool	20%
F2Pool	19%
LitecoinPool.org	14%
ViaBTC	12%

History and Future of Litecoin (LTC) Mining pools

The first Litecoin mining pool opened for business in 2011. It was a combination of Poolar’s ideas and heavy-modified variation of Jeff Garzik’s push pool. It was the first PPS (pay per share) for LTC. In 2012 miners were able to reduce the usage of their network bandwidth, which is also known as “vardiff”, or variable-difficulty shares.

In 2012 this pool had over 40% of the overall Litecoin network. This was possible thanks to its reliability and futuristic features. Miners just couldn’t resist it.

The back-end software creator Pooler, started with the ad-hoc, which later needed to be updated and rewritten. This happened in 2013 with the implementation of scalability optimizations and advanced efficiency implementations. In other words, he wrote the software from scratch, applying the Stratum protocol in cpuminers. This move made LitecoinPool.org the first one using extensions like “suggest_target”, “resume” and “suggest_difficulty”.

The pool and its software didn’t stop there. The development took the next step in 2014 with an upgrade of the secure aspect of mining. Basically, they protect the miners from man-in-the-middle attacks by pointing their actions through SSL or TLS-encrypted Stratum connections.