Quote from: falconae on April 14, 2013, 05:29:28 PM

I've just been testing it out solo (yes I know that speed is better suited for pool) and have been switching to each new version. When you do that, does the work continue from the last point you were at? or does it start fresh each time and the previous work is lost?

when you get it perfected, what are the chances of moving it over to bitcoin mining?

I am puzzled that your 9800 GT delivers "only" so little hashing power. It has 112 CUDA cores after all! My 9600M GT in the laptop does 9.6 kHash/s on Linux with just 32 CUDA cores.

It doesn't really matter from where your miner continues. Hashing is a like lottery game. Each hashing attempt has the same chance of being below the difficulty target. On average every 2.5 minutes we have a new block on the litecoin network, and hence all work begins from scratch. Even if a new transaction is added to the current block in your "litecoind" program, then hashing has to begin from scratch.

All the work you can attempt is to to try 2^32 different hashes - 4294967296 exactly (the "nonce" field has 32 bits). Also you can vary the timestamp field in the block ever so slightly, which gives you a few some more combinations to try. This is important for ASIC miners on Bitcoin. They are so fast that they have to vary more than just the nonce. Wink

If you solo mine at this low hash rate, you might get a block (50 LTC + transaction fees) once per year or so. Bad idea, unless you get lucky and find a block in a few days already (hello, it's a lottery!)

Pools set much easier difficulties, so they can "count" the work sent in by clients. This is then called shares, and used to compute payouts. wemineltc.com have just started to roll out variable difficulty (VARDIFF) which adjusts to the individual client hashing powers. So the number of shares reported per hour stays constant, but for payout the shares are weighed according to their difficulty.

Christian