Litecoin is now a coin that can be mined by gpu. That is reason enough. If the longevity of Litecoin is now effected, I'd like to know. On the other hand, if the first people to gpu mine get an advantage great! I doubt it, and there isn't enough money in it to be more than a topic of curiosity. This is a money market no matter how you look at it for most of us.
Yes, everything you state is true, this is a money market that is hopefully full of saavy people that will realize what gpu mining could potentially do to this currency.
What I am trying to get across is:
You would be silly to mine litecoins with your gpu when you can make more with bitcoins right now. Also, Flooding the market with GPU mined litecoins isn't going to drive the price of litecoins up as far as I know.
And yes, you can probably pay someone to make a GPU miner - but they are not going to take litecoins. Hell, as demonstrated by the reaper miner, there could already be GPU miners in use that aren't being distributed.
We have the big issue of the currency being developed to be complementary to bitcoin and not a competitor for GPU usage ... Now that it is a competitor, how is that going to affect things?
I'm not against the bounty for a fully functional gpu miner, I just don't see any good to come out of it.
I don't see any value to being an early adopter of GPU mining with a currency with the current value of litecoin.
edit: I could be just being all doom and gloom here though. I would love for someone to brighten up my outlook on litecoin gpu mining
Also, need to do some more reading on the efficiency factor.I see the point many people are bringing up about it damaging the system, but Litecoin is NOW a GPU coin that is more profitable on CPU for the time being. GPU mining has been done, and now Litecoin needs to adapt and change it's plan. Even if it isn't profitable now, the ability is still there for when or if it does become a more viable currency. I was hoping we could all use this thread to start talking about getting better miners more than "should we" because if it can be done, it will, and someone will use that to hurt the community to either 51% it or purposely fuck the economy.
I like Litecoin and want to see it thrive, but I REALLY don't want to turn a blind eye to this because I don't want it to happen.
Scrypt-Litecoin miner can't be that fast as Bitcoin, so 7970 has unreacheble theoritacal maximum of 1200 kh/s
To attack network you need 51% this means with this rate someone has to have Farm of 50+ 7970.
Is it possible to attack well costy
5870 has unreachable maximum at 500 kh/s
and so on.At this time it's not worth to attack chain, I think releasing good Scrypt GPU-miner will even strngth network and make it more Valuable.
You shouldn't care about 51% from GPU miners, the chain can be EASY! attacked by botnet.
if a middle botnet node can give 10kh/s you need just 5000+ nodes! it's just TINY! botnet.
So i think Scrypt-GPU-miner is even good for LTC not bad, more hashrate so even better protection of a chain.
P.S. LTC miners and Bitcoin miners on GPU not that competative, LTC-scrypt miner performs on Nvidia about the same as on AMD.
the second thing, only really "special" cards give very big performance, like 7970, 7950, 6990, GT590 and so on.