Litecoin is an alternative to Bitcoin (BTC) that is designed to reduce the comparative advantage of using custom ASICs (or GPUs) for mining it relative to using a conventional CPU. Its future is even less certain that BTC, of course, as a later comer, but the technically interesting bits lie in its proof-of-work hash function: Scrypt. Scrypt is designed to be "memory-hard" in addition to being computationally hard.
Just before a spike in litecoin prices, a developer a week and a half writing a better scrypt miner for NVidia-based cards using the Kepler architecture. Which meant that, as of this writing, his code was about 30% or 40% faster than any of the public code for scrypt hashing on Nvidia cards. The core improvements: It went from about 150 kh/sec to about 220 kh/s, and its CPU use dropped from 30% to 0.1%.
With the GPU hitting 215-220 kh/s and the CPU at 35 kh/s (remember, it was idle), he figured that he could conservatively get 230 kh/s. Assuming a 10% overhead in shifting the money back from LTC -> USD, and taking a conservative view of the likely sale price (there's a lag between mining them and selling them), then mining on Amazon would produce about $50-$75/month/instance.
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Just before a spike in litecoin prices, a developer a week and a half writing a better scrypt miner for NVidia-based cards using the Kepler architecture. Which meant that, as of this writing, his code was about 30% or 40% faster than any of the public code for scrypt hashing on Nvidia cards. The core improvements: It went from about 150 kh/sec to about 220 kh/s, and its CPU use dropped from 30% to 0.1%.
With the GPU hitting 215-220 kh/s and the CPU at 35 kh/s (remember, it was idle), he figured that he could conservatively get 230 kh/s. Assuming a 10% overhead in shifting the money back from LTC -> USD, and taking a conservative view of the likely sale price (there's a lag between mining them and selling them), then mining on Amazon would produce about $50-$75/month/instance.
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