[Caketh]

Lets quickly do the math on this.

At the time of writing, Litecoin is at $23.50 and Bitstamp is showing Bitcoin at $821.

The cost of the lowest service is 0.75BTC pa, which works out to be $615.75 per year.

615.75/23.50 = 26.2021276596

At a rate of 0.5 MH/s, we're looking at 0.12406948 LTC a day[1] at the current network difficulty.

So, to mine 26.2021276596 LTC, it would take us 211.1891470779115 days. That came out a lot quicker than I thought it would, but still an exorbitant amount of time.

LTC is not my interest or strong point, so if there are any errors, please let me know so I can correct them.

[1] https://www.litecoinpool.org/calc?hashrate=500&difficulty=38...

[mrud]

Don't forget that the difficulty [1] will increase over time. By using the calculator [2] with only a 5% increase, zero electricity costs etc. we don't see any return at all.

[1] http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty

[2] http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator

[tibbon]

The difficulty will increase, but the price may increase.

I remember a year or two ago I was calculating all my BTC mining efforts on its value being under $30. Some efforts were break-even at sub-$30 exchange rates, but now in retrospect were well worth it.

But the big term is may, as it also may decrease.

[Caketh]

Ouch. Thanks for the information.

In addition, that second link helps us work out what equivalent hardware at home we could use to accomplish a similar (non)return. Purchasing an AMD HD7970 graphics card, with a hash rate of 0.7MH/s, and mining with that could arguably be cheaper in the long run

[faizanaziz]

The problem comes when you start factoring electricity and so on. In my calculation the difference is just too little. Plus you have the advantage of not investing time into it.

[faizanaziz]

Again this is assuming the price of LTC also does not increase. That is unlikely if the difficulty increases.

[mrud]

That's true. It would start being worthwhile at around 70$ (maximum price was iirc ~48$ recently). It may be very well possible to get an return especially if you believe in litecoin (328 times increase in 2013 [1])

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/01/13/a-100-wor...

[faizanaziz]

This is all assuming that litecoin does not go up in trading at all. If assuming litecoin goes to 40 - 60 USD which it was just Dec 2013, source http://coinmarketcap.com/xrp_180.html then the recovery time will be between 50 to 100 days.

Only do this if you believe in litecoins

[Caketh]

Yes, that is true. My post was assuming the price of LTC did not change, although over the past 2 weeks it hasn't ventured very far north of of $24 or even very far south $22.

http://www.ltc-charts.com/period-charts.php?period=2-weeks&r...

[nwh]

If the price goes up you would have been better off just keeping your money in litecoin to begin with. There's no way you can win with this, that's why they're selling it.