Welcome to litecoinpool.org
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
- Merged mining (AuxPoW) of several altcoins, including Dogecoin
- Support for Stratum over TLS, to prevent MITM attacks
- 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. We take on the risk of bad luck so you don't have to deal with variance and orphaned blocks; this is why the service requires a 2% nominal fee.
Note that PPS fees are only nominal, and cannot be compared to proportional/PPLNS fees. On those systems, miners are only rewarded when and if a block matures, but a significant fraction of all blocks found get orphaned from the network, and therefore yield no reward. For this reason, a 2% PPS fee does not mean that we keep 2% of what our miners earn, not even in the long run.
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 was also the very first pool to introduce 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, 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”.
The innovations continued, and in September 2014 LitecoinPool.org became the first Litecoin pool to offer secure mining over TLS-encrypted Stratum connections, protecting miners from potential man-in-the-middle attacks.
2014 was also the year Dogecoin became merge-mineable. Support for merged mining was available from the very first Litecoin-compatible block, and miners started receiving higher Litecoin rewards which accounted for the added profitability. This system lasted until 2024, when the ever-rising profitability of Dogecoin prompted a separation of Litecoin and Dogecoin rewards. Miners now receive both litecoins and dogecoins simultaneously, with both types of rewards still following a pure PPS system.
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.