The Altcoin Thread

Dark Shade

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 2, 2006
Messages
1,872
I've noticed more and more threads about litecoin and other alternative cryptocurrencies (being other than bitcoin itself). I think consolidating altcoin disucssions into a single thread will be beneficial.

The short list of popular Altcoins (always changing):
Litecoin (LTC)

Feathercoin (FTC)

Novacoin (NVC)

Terracoin (TRC)

Worldcoin (WDC)

Peercoin (PPC)

Primecoin (XPM)

Dogecoin (DOGE)


Helpful sites:
BTC/LTC/NMC Chain Data (http://allchains.info/)
Transaction Explorer (http://cryptocoinexplorer.com/)
Coinwarz Calculators and Altcoin Market Watch (http://www.coinwarz.com/)
General Altcoin Information (http://altcoins.com/)
Protect your Wallet! (bitcoin site but applies to all cryptocurrency wallets) (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet)
Altcoin Information Dashboard and Calculators (http://www.dustcoin.com/)

Markets:
Mt. Gox (bitcoin only) (https://www.mtgox.com/)
Coinbase (bitcoin only) (https://coinbase.com/)
BTC-E (multiple coins) (https://btc-e.com/)
Vircurex (multiple coins) (https://vircurex.com/)
Coins-E (all coins?) (https://www.coins-e.com)
Cryptsy (all coins?) (https://www.cryptsy.com)


__________________________


Why mine altcoins?
The popularity of altcoins has risen dramatically since ASICs arrived on the scene for BTC mining. This generally tossed GPU mining profitability out the window. Most altcoins, or coins other than Bitcoins, are still very much able to be mined and utilized with GPU power. (currently, scrypt-based altcoins do not have an ASIC like SHA-256 coins do) These altcoins will vary in how much they are worth against other currencies, but normally they are tied to the BTC value, much like other fiat currencies used worldwide have attached value to the US dollar. With the explosion of popularity that BTC has been going through in the recent months, and with the difficulty levels of BTC (and to a lesser extent, LTC) raising to huge numbers, altcoins can be another source of income for those with the ability to mine them.​
 
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Nice thread. I am currently mining LTC, FTC, SXC, and some NET.

Reasons:
  • LTC: At current value is still the best per difficulty although this is changing with the increase of difficulty. Is also at current cost the second behind BTC which to me means it is the most likely to be recognized and possible go up even further in value making my current coins worth more.
  • FTC: Decent difficulty to return value and also the most likely in my opinion of the smaller coins to take off.
  • SXC: Has the potential to become popular on adult sites which would see a massive increase on value over the next couple years turning low difficulty coins earned now to a decent profit.
  • NET: Just for fun I mined ~2500 in 30 minutes. Plan to do this on all low difficulty coins just because if they even ever hit a dollar or 2 that would mean decent profits with little investment. All I need to do is hold them for a couple years and see.
 
Dude, how could you leave SexCoin off that list? Or JunkCoin for that matter. I would mine sexcoin purely so that I could tell people that I have sexcoins.

Nice work though, it should give a lot of people a place to start.
 
PTS, for CPU only mining. It's different enough from everything else to have me interested in it.

1) CPU only mining, for now. So, puts all of those idle CPUs in mining rigs to work.
2) It feels more like a crypto stock than a coin. You have to read about it to get a better understanding of it, but if the people behind PTS go big, then so will the value of PTS itself. You're actually more or less investing in a crypto company, as opposed to pure speculation driven alt coins.

Other than that, I am doing FTC on my GPUs right now. It feels so much better getting over 100 coins per day as opposed to not even 3. And profits on a per day basis are about the same. Once I mine about 2500 FTC, I'll switch over to another alt like WDC or SBC and get a small stash of those as well (only if they're comparable to LTC on a per day basis, otherwise it makes more sense to mine LTC and trade on exchanges).
 
Feathercoin miner here! Was mining LTC but with the sudden difficulty increase i was barely getting 1 a day. Waiting for the day i can cash out my stockpile of FTC:cool:
 
I'm doing Noirbits for a bit. Seems like it has a future, still kinda small so easy enough to mine, but a pretty high value even now.
 
With all these new fangled coins - how widely do prices fluctuate? Any money to be had day trading?
 
With all these new fangled coins - how widely do prices fluctuate? Any money to be had day trading?

At this time, the only day trade worthy one is LTC and that fluctuates THROUGHOUT the week. Friday, people sell the coins and on Sat and Sun it flat-lines, but on Monday people buy back in and it causes a major rise on Monday and Tuesday.

Everything else, its worth just gathering coins for the time being. FTC as stated earlier has the best chance to actually take off after LTC.
 
I'm currently swapping back and forth when stratum pools go down, between FTC and SBC, and if both are down, back to grinding LTC.
 
OP, you might consider adding www.dustcoin.com to your list of helpful sites. It's a calculator but shows you the profitability of mining an altcoin as compared to BTC or LTC. It's not comprehensive, but I've found it to be useful.
 
Primarily mining SXC right now, but have mined FTC and looking to mine some DGC tonight to test the waters. Also Decimus what were you mining those NET coins with?
 
Primarily mining SXC right now, but have mined FTC and looking to mine some DGC tonight to test the waters. Also Decimus what were you mining those NET coins with?

I am assuming the question is what hardware I used? I switched over my main mining rig of 4 XFX 280x's to them for a little while using cgminer. Now that I have my second mining rig almost up I will be switching my 2 gaming computers with 7950's to mine alt coins while not in use.
 
I am assuming the question is what hardware I used? I switched over my main mining rig of 4 XFX 280x's to them for a little while using cgminer. Now that I have my second mining rig almost up I will be switching my 2 gaming computers with 7950's to mine alt coins while not in use.

Ah ok lol damn your hardware is a lot better than mine. Alright, thanks.
 
Ah ok lol damn your hardware is a lot better than mine. Alright, thanks.

Yeah I kind of jumped in. . . :)

I am pleased with my current ROI so far enough so that I purchased the second rig. Current setup is 8 280x's, 2 7950's mining roughly 2/3rds of each day, and debating if I should have my 7750 mine at all.
 
Yeah I kind of jumped in. . . :)

I am pleased with my current ROI so far enough so that I purchased the second rig. Current setup is 8 280x's, 2 7950's mining roughly 2/3rds of each day, and debating if I should have my 7750 mine at all.

the 7750 should still garner some achievement, however, I don't think I would put it in a solo rig, I would have it in a rig with a spare PCI-e, if you put this in its own rig, it would never give you a profit.
 
the 7750 should still garner some achievement, however, I don't think I would put it in a solo rig, I would have it in a rig with a spare PCI-e, if you put this in its own rig, it would never give you a profit.

It's in my HTPC rig so I am not going to be taking it out. What I was considering using it on are alt coins that have almost no difficulty right now on the off chance that in 2-3 years they gain some sort of value.
 
I need more cards... Even some 5830s would be fine by me lol. Got me a Cooler Master HAF XB EVO coming for xmas that I hope to turn into whatever I want, like a mining machine :).
 
If I manage to get a few altcoin pools going, which ones would most folks here be interested in?
 
[RANT]
I'll tell you what we also need besides a pool... we need another good exchange! Damn Cryptsy! I've only been using it for like 3 days and already I hate it! Stuff is so slow, there's so many problems. Trying to withdraw anything from there is like trying to coax a hungry rabid dog to let go of a fresh steak.

Ya, I know there are other exchanges out there, but Cryptsy seems to be the most popular among the alt coins and has the most volume to get orders filled. It also has one of the biggest selection of trading pairs I've seen on an exchange.

So why does it have to suck so bad?
[/RANT]
Sorry to derail the thread... carry on.
 
Does anyone have a suggestion for a JKC pool? I was using the one on coin-base.info but it sucks ass. It is constantly going down, has broken links, doesn't show you things like unpaid shares, and I have yet to get it to transfer my junkcoins out.
 
If I manage to get a few altcoin pools going, which ones would most folks here be interested in?

I've been mining Primecoin and I just started mining Feathercoin. But if you want me to use a [H]ard pool for either of these coins, you're going to need to get a decent hash rate going. The problem with starting a pool is that nobody wants to mine in a weak pool, and you end up with the catch-22 situation where to get more miners, you need more miners.
 
[RANT]
I'll tell you what we also need besides a pool... we need another good exchange! Damn Cryptsy! I've only been using it for like 3 days and already I hate it! Stuff is so slow, there's so many problems. Trying to withdraw anything from there is like trying to coax a hungry rabid dog to let go of a fresh steak.

Ya, I know there are other exchanges out there, but Cryptsy seems to be the most popular among the alt coins and has the most volume to get orders filled. It also has one of the biggest selection of trading pairs I've seen on an exchange.

So why does it have to suck so bad?
[/RANT]
Sorry to derail the thread... carry on.

It sucks so bad because its experiencing ridiculous growth. If you think its bad now, you should've used it 2 weeks ago. You would submit an order and it wouldn't even accept it part of the time. The other part of the time it would accept it after a long delay. You would be sitting there with your coins showing as unavailable, but also with no indication that the order was created

With the massive growth in alt coins over the last month or so... it would be hard for most large exchanges to keep up with growth.
 
I've been mining Primecoin and I just started mining Feathercoin. But if you want me to use a [H]ard pool for either of these coins, you're going to need to get a decent hash rate going. The problem with starting a pool is that nobody wants to mine in a weak pool, and you end up with the catch-22 situation where to get more miners, you need more miners.

Yeah, that's the initial problem with pools, hopefully if we do get a pool going, it has enough support at the beginning to garner more users and get that hashrate to an acceptable level. The nice thing about going after some lesser altcoins is that the hashrate doesn't need to be astronomical to get good returns.
 
[RANT]
I'll tell you what we also need besides a pool... we need another good exchange! Damn Cryptsy! I've only been using it for like 3 days and already I hate it! Stuff is so slow, there's so many problems. Trying to withdraw anything from there is like trying to coax a hungry rabid dog to let go of a fresh steak.

Ya, I know there are other exchanges out there, but Cryptsy seems to be the most popular among the alt coins and has the most volume to get orders filled. It also has one of the biggest selection of trading pairs I've seen on an exchange.

So why does it have to suck so bad?
[/RANT]
Sorry to derail the thread... carry on.

I've been dealing with cryptsy for quite a while myself and I'm just sick of it. I'm done trying to use their interface for trading. I started building an auto trader that morphed from just wanting to monitor why my coin collections were worth because when you own small amounts of 50+ different coins and you see the estimated portfolio value jumping all over the place you'd like to keep a better eye on your coins and manually checking the value of 50+ coins is just a stupid waste of time.
 
Yeah, that's the initial problem with pools, hopefully if we do get a pool going, it has enough support at the beginning to garner more users and get that hashrate to an acceptable level. The nice thing about going after some lesser altcoins is that the hashrate doesn't need to be astronomical to get good returns.

I've put thoughts into building a pool and if you pick a small coin just somebody like me with 7Mh+ is good enough for a start. The problem with that though is I'm not devoted to go all in on a single coin. things like middlecoin are basically destroying the point in pools for a specific coin. I started using them yesterday at around 3-4PM EST and woke up this morning to nearly .2BTC once they cash me out hopefully tonight
 
Man, Bitcoin is crashing hard today.

happens like every week, I expected it on saturday... I had sold all of mine back on friday at $940 but rebought at 850 this morning right before it went down more. I gave up on waiting for crap to go way down.

oh well I'll just ride it out
 
Man, Bitcoin is crashing hard today.

It does the same thing almost on a weekly basis. I'm not too worried unless it shows signs of not recovering... meaning it goes down, levels off and stays there, or goes down, stops dropping hard, but continues to go down in tiny increments over the next weeks.

There may be a recovery of some sort. How big will depend on what the news from China really is. Rumor has it that the Peoples' Bank of China has asked all third party payment processors not to do business with bitcoin exchanges. So, that would effectively remove China, a major source of trading activity, from the crypto picture.
 
It does the same thing almost on a weekly basis. I'm not too worried unless it shows signs of not recovering... meaning it goes down, levels off and stays there, or goes down, stops dropping hard, but continues to go down in tiny increments over the next weeks.

There may be a recovery of some sort. How big will depend on what the news from China really is. Rumor has it that the Peoples' Bank of China has asked all third party payment processors not to do business with bitcoin exchanges. So, that would effectively remove China, a major source of trading activity, from the crypto picture.

Eh I am not that worried about the Chinese being kicked out completely. There will always be ways to transfer money around unless the People Bank of China just stops all international wire transfers. Might make it harder but not impossible.
 
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