litecoinpool.org
Charlie Lee [LTC] -

Mining litecoins since October 21, 2011

New to Litecoin mining? Read our Beginner's Guide!

Welcome to the first true pay-per-share (PPS) Litecoin pool. Some of our key features:

  • Exclusive ultra-low-latency Stratum server implementation, written in C
  • Support for Stratum over TLS, to prevent MITM attacks
  • Merged mining (AuxPoW) of several altcoins, paying out in litecoins
  • Support for the resume extension to Stratum
  • Adaptive share difficulty (“vardiff”), with support for manual tuning
  • Network of 8 geographically-distributed, redundant servers
  • Detailed stats updated every few seconds
  • Email notification of idle miners
  • Fee-free automatic and manual (instant) payouts
  • Two-factor authentication support
  • Website and mining interface also accessible as Tor hidden services
  • Extensive JSON API

The Reward System

Every valid share you submit to this pool is instantly credited to your account at the current pay-per-share (PPS) rate. This rate, expressed in litecoins, also takes into account merged-mined coins such as Dogecoin, resulting in higher payouts than a regular Litecoin pool. Thanks to merged mining, you have to pay no fee; in fact, your earnings may even be higher than with a 0-fee PPS system.

This is not a PPLNS, SMPPS or RBPPS pool: we always pay for your work, even if the pool has not yet solved enough blocks to cover the earnings generated. On other systems, miners are only rewarded when and if a block matures, but sometimes blocks get orphaned from the Litecoin network, and therefore yield no reward. A PPS pool, on the other hand, takes on the risk of bad luck so you don't have to deal with variance and orphaned blocks.

A Bit of History

LitecoinPool.org was started shortly after the birth of Litecoin by Pooler, who is well known in the community as a member of the Litecoin core development team and for being the maintainer of the cpuminer software package. Since the very start, the pool used ad-hoc software: Pooler wrote the front end entirely from scratch, with security and efficiency in mind, while the mining back end was originally a heavily-modified version of Jeff Garzik's pushpool. After two weeks of intensive testing, on November 5, 2011 the pool opened its doors to the public, becoming the first PPS pool for Litecoin. In April 2012 LitecoinPool.org also became the first pool to support variable-difficulty shares, a technique later dubbed “vardiff” by Bitcoin pools, allowing miners to drastically reduce their network bandwidth usage.

Thanks to its advanced features and its reliability, the pool quickly attracted a very high number of miners, to the point that during the first half of 2012 it often constituted over 40% of the entire Litecoin network. Due to centralization concerns, it was decided to temporarily close new registrations; later in 2012, registrations were reopened, but have since been subject to approval.

In August 2013 the back-end software was completely redesigned and rewritten from scratch to implement advanced efficiency and scalability optimizations that Pooler devised after implementing support for the Stratum protocol in cpuminer. This new implementation makes LitecoinPool.org the first Litecoin pool based entirely on software written from scratch, and the first pool to implement extensions to the Stratum protocol such as “resume”, “suggest_difficulty” and “suggest_target”.

In September 2014 LitecoinPool.org also became the first Litecoin pool to offer secure mining over TLS-encrypted Stratum connections, protecting miners from potential man-in-the-middle attacks.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all the people who have, directly or indirectly, contributed to the development of this pool. In particular, many thanks go to (in alphabetical order): coblee, DeLorean731, Derringer, diki, g2x3k, Graet, guruvan, inlikeflynn, jgarzik, LittleDuke, piperitapatty, pontius, rTech, shawnp0wers, ssvb, terrytibbs, WKnight, Xurious.



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