Same here.... as of today my 18Khs Litecoin-Rig is making more than my Jupiter....
But this insane price jump in Litecoins (11 days ago they were $4, now over $40), will attract many new script-miners and old Script-rigs which were turned-off (because energy costs) are turned-on again...So difficulty will skyrocket soon as well.
I am going to turn mine back on tonight. Only 4200kh/s and already paid for itself 1.5x but no reason to keep it in a cupboard with LTC at $40!!
Don't count too much on it. Everybody is wondering the same currently, and mining LTC is a lot easier than mining BTC.
Current Hashrate is only 48GH/s, or ~65000 AMD 7970/r9 280x.
With a 48$ LTC at the time of this post, you will have a rush on AMD's graphical cards, and you potentially have a few millions already sold in the previous monthes (from 7870 to r9 290x) that just need the person to be informed.
With a difficulty retarget every 3/4 days (could be even 2), expect it to explode in the next 2/3 weeks, then stabilize again when the expected ROI for newcomers will be more than 6 monthes.
Except of course if the LTC is at 200$+, which will just mean that the difficulty plateau will be 4 times higher than now.
So the question is in fact the same one as for BTC, will you ROI your investment ? Yes if the LTC increase by at least 2 times more while difficulty do not increase by 5-10 folds, else no.
The only difference is you'll know it much sooner (< 2 monthes).
I agree...starting now, buying new VGA-hardware to join the Litecoin network will not give you good ROI prospectives at all ...
But in my case: I started in May and didn't sell any Litecoin I mined. It was all deep red ROI until 20 days ago....Now I can say I made a 10 times profit on the initial hardware cost(but have to subtract 2 times on Energy cost, leaving 8 times). Odd...being a Miner.