Litecoin was up around 1LTC/0.001BTC a week or so ago, now it's 1LTC/0.000758BTC and still falling. Why?
Simple lack of interest in alternate cryptocurrencies. The average geek (if not the average Joe) has at least heard of Bitcoin at this point; Pretty much
no one outside the Bitcoin-enthusiast community has heard of LTC or any of the other alternatives.
I'm beginning to wonder if it would be more profitable to use my CPU for BTC/NMC merged mining.
On a typical modern quad-core CPU, you can expect somewhere around 15-20MH/s mining BTC. This will produce roughly 0.4BTC/month, or $2.00 at the current exchange rate (plus a tenth of a percent or so for merged NMC mining).
On the same CPU, you can expect to get 20-30KH/s mining LTC. This will yield roughly 675LTC/month, or $2.50.
So you will
still do better to mine LTC than BTC on a CPU. That said...
Neither actually has a net positive yield unless you get free electricity
...And if you somehow have free electricity, you should rush to buy as many 5830s (currently the cheapest in hardware overhead for the hash rate, ignoring power efficiency) as you can lay your hands on, which will give a payback of 3 months assuming the exchange rate holds near $5/BTC.